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AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



AN APOLOGY FOR 
OLD MAIDS 

AND OTHER ESSAYS 

BY 

HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK 

AUTHOR OF 

" ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY," " A SHORT HISTORY OF ITALY " 

" THE NEW AMERICAN TYPE AND OTHER ESSAYS " 

" ESSAYS ON GREAT WRITERS," ETC. 



WITH A PREFACE BY 
OWEN WISTER 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1916 

All rights rtservtd 






Copyright, 1909, 1913, 1914, 1915 and 1916, 
By the Atlantic Monthly Company. 

Copyright, 1915, 
By The Yale Publishing Association. 

Copyright, 1916, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1916. 




NOV 23 1916 



Norfaooli '^xtm 

J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



3Ci.A445751 



TO 

THE CLASS OF 1916 

OF 

THE BREARLEY SCHOOL 

THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY 
DEDICATED 



« Retire into thyself." 

Marcus Aurelius. 



All the essays in this volume appeared in the Atlantic 
Monthly, except **An Apology for Old Maids" which 
appeared in the Yale Review. For permission to re- 
publish them here I am indebted to the kindness of 

the Editors of those reviews. 

H. D. S. 

New York, 191 6. 



irii 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface by Owen Wister xi 

An Apology for Old Maids . . . . i 

De Senectute 20 

The Religion of the Past .... 40 

Credo Quia Possibile 70 

On Being III 82 

The House of Sorrow no 

A Forsaken God 135 

The Classics Again 164 

Literature and Cosmopolitanism . . . 203 



IX 



PREFACE 

Only a few hours ago I paused at a teeming book-stall 
in the South Station, Boston. Beside me stood Inelegant 
Leisure in petticoats, choosing. The emotion that rose 
in me was one of thankfulness that a paper famine is said 
to be upon us. 

Lot was assured that a given number of respectable citi- 
zens could avert from his town its doom. Had we, I 
wondered, among our huge population of novelists enough 
for salvation? — Well, I thought next, among another 
company it's more hopeful. A small company, to be 
sure, and they don't live in the best-seller belt ; but, any 
how, they do live — and persist. 

Why is it that our American essayists are on the whole 
so good and our American novelists are on the whole so 
bad ? As with guns so with books it is the man behmd 
them that counts. He matters ; more than his talent, or 
his learning, or his subject, more than anything, he mat- 
ters. It is Montaigne himself we enjoy ; it is Scott him- 
self, Scott the man throughout his romances, who lives 
most, who fills and warms their pages with his noble. 



XI 



xii PREFACE 

kind wholesomeness. A novel taps its author's intimate 
essence just as searchingly as any essay, is as much a 
vehicle for interpretation and comment (visible or invisi- 
ble), and the pose of impersonality adopted by certain 
French writers deceives not this generation and never 
need have deceived any. Inevitably the man flows into 
his book, and if he is a vacuum the book will be empty 
— and so back we come to our question again : why do 
our essays mostly size up so well while our stories size 
up mostly so ill ? Pick up the first, you find a somebody 
behind them generally, behind the last generally a nobody. 
But why ? 

Do these writing nobodys fancy a real novel an easy 
thing to make, or merely that a quack novel is an easy 
thing to sell ? Is Inelegant Leisure in petticoats the sole 
root of the evil ? It is to be noticed at our railroad-stalls 
that the fi"esh work of fiction has come to bear a startling 
resemblance to the box of fresh candy beside it, and that 
over both Inelegant Leisure seems to hover impartially on 
her way to her week-ends. 

The question is worth an essay. Let some one of that 
good company deal with it and tell us how it comes about 
that most of our essayists have fi-om the early days even 
until the present written all round most of our novelists ; 
that Irving in his kind is better than Cooper in his kind ; 
that Emerson is better than Hawthorne; that "The 
Autocrat of the Breakfast-table ' ' has more life in it than 



PREFACE xiii 

** Elsie Venner" ; that Poe's critical writing is more 
remarkable (for that time of day) than his tales, which 
Tieck and Hoffmann obviously prompted ; and that our 
two most famous pieces of American prose belong, both 
of them, in their essence, to the family of the essay — 
Washington's Farewell Address, and Lincoln's Speech at 
Gettysburg. 

I merely look the present ground over, glance at our 
bursting shelf of fiction, compare it to our decent shelf 
of essays, observe the railroad book-stalls and Inelegant 
Leisure in petticoats, survey the best-seller belt — and 
offer my American thanks to our American essayists for 
saving our face. 

Yes ; that is indeed what they do ; they save our 
face. We can point to them without blushing. Amid 
the weltering inanity of present American Letters it is 
their pens chiefly that write the leavening sentences of 
wit, thought, and cultivation, it is their books mainly that 
we send to friends in the civilized world, because they 
show that all of us do not live in the best-seller belt, that 
some of us are writers and readers with civilized intelli- 
gence. Our gratitude to them is kin to that which we 
feel towards any and every American who through word 
or deed has helped the Allies. They are our vindicators. 

In the track of Mr. Sedgwick's first volume of essays 
this also shall voyage for our vindication. He has built 
here, as it were, a quiet house of revery. In it, as you 



xiv PREFACE 

wander about among the various rooms, you seem to hear 
the sound of an organ somewhere, patches of light from 
old stained glass seem to fall on certain spots, and not 
a noise from the street enters. At one of the windows, 
indeed, the War looks in : but the War is no noise from 
the street ; through it speaks the voice of our stricken 
planet. In Mr. Sedgwick's pages the '* incantations of 
hope * * — I borrow a word from one of them — are sub- 
dued to mingle with many other strains. I have found 
no better reply to Emerson's fallacy that a translation is 
as good as the original than a paragraph of Mr. Sedg- 
wick's. I cannot be as sure as he is that Goethe's influ- 
ence upon us was once so potent — but the author has 
reflected about this and I have not. Indeed, the point 
is not that you agree or disagree with Mr. Sedgwick 
about Old Age and Youth, or can derive simultaneous 
comforts from reason and mysticism : the house is full 
of tender beauty and ministers like the quiet Andante of 
some symphony to the spirit's well-being. 

OWEN WISTER. 
October 19, 191 6. 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD 
MAIDS 

Married people, animated by the prejudices of 
an animal ancestry and by a jealous esprit de corps, 
long ago created a legend about celibates, which 
depicts them as crotchety, graceless, ill-dressed, 
ill-mannered, ugly, and selfish; and they have 
taught this legend to so many generations of 
children that even now little boys look on celi- 
bates with disdain. And, as little boys grow 
to be bigger boys, disdain gains support from a 
vague knowledge that if celibates had succeeded 
in winning the world over to their horrid way of 
thinking, they, princes of the kingdom of youth, 
would never have come into their own at all. This 
silly legend has also been taken up by thought- 
less jesters, who ridicule that group of celibates 
least able to defend themselves, elderly women; 
and their mockery encourages boys in the gross 
illusion. But the legend gives way before a 
widening experience; and the high ideahsm that 

B I 



2 AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 

impels celibates to take their solitary way must 
always, sooner or later, make itself known by 
its fruits. 

Who, that looks back on the steadily deepening, 
steadily refining, memories of the past, does not 
see some celibate figure that shone on his path 
with a peculiar light ? Ordinarily such figures 
are the figures of women, for the deprivation of 
motherhood is a greater loss to a woman than the 
deprivation of paternity to a man, and renders 
her more fit to pour into an alien channel her 
dammed-up sympathies; but it is not always so 
— the celibate brother, uncle, or priest, may fill 
as large a space in the gracious retrospect of 
memory for a girl as the unmarried woman for a 
boy. The child across whose path the light 
from that figure fell could not analyze those 
qualities of which he was aware in the spinster, 
but he soon learned to recognize them, to enjoy 
them, to love them, to need them. In her com- 
pany, free from the spirit of the household, un- 
vexed by the genius of the family, he wandered 
into a pleasant, unfenced spaciousness, where his 
individuality found a liberal reception, where his 
tastes and whims received each a separate and 
personal welcome. Perhaps the radiant figure 
was an aunt or elderly cousin, bearing on her 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 3 

face the show of solitary communions, who, at 
his call, wrapping her shoulders in a white shawl 
would walk beside him in a tolerant yet restrain- 
ing sympathy, as if she beheld what he did "with 
larger, other eyes than" his, and suggested ap- 
preciations here and there quite different from 
family appreciations. She did not take away 
from his interest or pleasure in the family house- 
hold, but controlled and encouraged those moods, 
those closed compartments of a boy's life into 
which a family has no admittance ; she was the 
compassionate goddess of solitude, of melancholy, 
of those vague affections that in the period of 
adolescence grow into religion or love, and spend 
themselves in moody wanderings through fields 
and woods, in bad verses, in indignant outbursts 
at the commonness, the vulgarity of life. She 
was not called upon to reconcile those fitful 
periods with due regard for the dinner hour, for 
company, for lessons, for the social duties of 
croquet or tennis ; she did not repeat the inade- 
quate formulas of tutorial and domestic life; 
she did not have to enforce rules based on the 
greatest good of the greatest number of children ; 
she left unopened those budgets of good advice, 
which each generation solemnly receives from 
the generation before, and passes on solemnly 



4 AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 

to the generation after. She stood apart as the 
friend of his individuality, of his fooHsh fancies, 
of his conceits and wayward desires, of his boyish 
admirations and hopes, of his incapacities for 
deaHng with the ordinary Hfe about him. 

Perhaps that graceful and radiant figure, which 
to the inefficient boy appeared the embodiment of 
wisdom and sweet reason, had cast at her, behind 
her back, from some careless lips, the epithet "old 
maid." The coarse monosyllables fell with a thud 
on his indignant ear. The irreverence packed into 
that term was only comparable to indifl^erence 
to a moonlit night, to Shelley, to the arched pine 
walk, to the violin. The scofF, whether intended 
as such or not, was the first thing to set him won- 
dering as to the differences between that beloved 
figure and other figures also beloved, and to offer 
the clue that led to the explanation of those dif- 
ferences. Was it because she was an old maid, 
that she shed so fresh an atmosphere around her, 
like an unseen spring cooling and quickening 
a mossy spot ; that she stood between the com- 
mon conventional course of daily family life and 
the impatient demands of adolescent moods ; that 
she applied her comprehensive yet unobtrusive 
criticism to the standards of what he called the 
world ; that she could comfort so effectively hurts 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 5 

that others unwittingly gave, and sympathize 
with the virtue mingled and blended with his 
faults ? Was that the reason that she cheered 
and encouraged the lonely little boy by asserting 
the value of his individual soul ? Were such the 
consequences of childlessness, of perpetual 
maidenhood ? Then why did those boys and 
girls, who embodied his world and had no inkling 
of his fitful moods, call her "old maid *' in derision ? 
The phrase "old maid,'* to which the mating 
instincts have grudged the gentleness and refine- 
ment of polysyllables, conjures up a vision of outer 
isolation, which to the uncelibate looks cold and 
dismal. A ghostly atmosphere envelops that 
limbo beyond the hearth, outside the home; and 
the lonely women wandering there wear a sad 
livery. Are we deceived by the imagination, or 
by the flickering light cast by the ruddy fire of our 
hearths ; or is the veiled melancholy, that as chil- 
dren we saw and did not understand yet found so 
sympathetic to our discontents, a sign that nature 
has punished the violation of her law } Nature, 
goddess of instinct, stern, as she needs must be in 
order to be kind, compels obedience by what means 
she can ; and upon those that disobey she sets 
the stamp of her displeasure. At her bidding, 
corporeal existence rebels against final extinction. 



6 AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 

Backward it looks, and through the sequent 
generations, human and prehuman, back through 
the vastness of unrecorded time, all along in unin- 
terrupted illumination, it sees the cheerful glow 
of life, the radiance of the sacred fire, flaming, 
gleaming, glimmering, without a break, back to 
the first Promethean spark that glittered in the 
lifeless world ; turning forward, it beholds the 
dark come again in all the repulsiveness of cold, 
dead vacancy. The poor warm body, rejoicing 
in the sun, shudders in corporeal trepidation ; it 
cannot escape the self-reproach of treason, that it 
has suffered the sacred fire, — tended, cherished, 
preserved, with such great pains, at such great 
cost, fed upon love, devotion, and self-denial, — 
to die out. No living thing can betray the confi- 
dence of nature without remorse ; and that mute 
self-condemnation, in spite of the persuasions of 
conscience or the bravado of reason, leaves its 
ineffaceable mark. 

Nor is this consciousness of treason her only 
punishment. The old maid bars against herself 
the single gate that leads into the Kingdom of 
Heaven of this world ; she shall never have pos- 
session of those 

Stragglers into loving arms 
Those climbers up of knees 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 7 

that constitute for fathers and mothers the reve- 
lation and proof of a divine element in humanity; 
she shall never see incarnate in big round eyes and 
baby fingers the innocence, the love, the faith, 
the fearlessness, of that Kingdom of Heaven. 

The celibate is brave, and what seems to us a 
distinguishing mark of inward pain, may be in 
part the grimness of a resolute courage. In days 
gone by, old maids were strong in the belief of 
an immortal soul. Upborne by an exalted mood, 
they rebuked the body, and looked forward to 
the rapturous union of Being with Being. Now 
that the spirit apart from the body is less easily 
perceived, the celibate has the greater need of 
courage ; to defy nature, in spite of religious dis- 
belief, solely for the sake of an ideal, for the sake 
of spiritual salvation during the brief period of 
bodily life, has a touch of the heroic. For nature 
is no mean enemy ; she does not turn and run be- 
fore a sudden onslaught of spiritual frenzy. Na- 
ture can wait; this is the source of her power. 
Individuals upon individuals, generations upon 
generations, may rebel against her laws; she 
abides and punishes the disobedient. She abides, 
and in the course of time the wilfulness of her chil- 
dren spends itself, their passion for things of the 
spirit droops, and they return, "like colts that 



8 AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 

have frisked for a day in the fields," back to their 
stalls and obedience at night. Only a steadfast 
courage, a steadfast faith, in the daily, hourly, 
momentary, worth of the spirit continues to hold 
out. The solitary old maid who has turned her 
back upon the comforts of affection, of sympathy, 
of a home, of children, of comradeship in passing 
through the great dark of this existence, in which 
like children we need to hold one another's hands 
to keep our courage up, may not to the careless 
eye present a conspicuous figure of heroism, but 
perhaps the ideal has no more valiant champion 
than she. 

Though from one point of view the old maid's 
struggle for her own spiritual salvation may seem 
to be a matter of no special concern to general hu- 
man society, yet from another it is of much con- 
cern, for she can render society services of great 
and peculiar importance. Her opportunities call 
for her; her uses make her a necessary supple- 
ment to the mother in all the tasks laid on women, 
other than the primary task of maternity. 

The mother is a passionate partisan, she is all 
for nature. Whatever her maternal feelings sug- 
gest becomes her duty, her creed, her truth. She 
sacrifices herself for her children, she is ready to 
sacrifice all things else for them ; she is a fanatic 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 9 

in the cause of animal immortality and prostrates 
herself in blind adoration before the god of earthly 
life. Her judgments are all crooked, for she bases 
all her opinions upon the law of maternity, as a 
lawyer bases his on the Constitution. The ma- 
ternal instinct, so strong emotionally, so weak 
rationally, bursts into intemperate theories. She 
values no principle but that of animal life, she 
knows no measure but that of numbers. Quan- 
tity ! Quantity ! is the mother's cry. 

To the old spinster, safe at anchor out of the 
hot current of corporeal existence, the quality 
of life is of more consequence than its quantity — 
though more Hfe is good, the fuller Hfe is better; 
and she finds her duty in the endeavor to better 
the quality of life. She regards with sympathy, 
but not without criticism, the fierce physical 
desire that a race, a species, a family, shall in- 
herit the earth, and sets herself apart as a disciple 
of the spirit to temper that animal heat with the 
cold impartiality of those who have no hope of 
animal immortality. By virtue of her isolation she 
is a critic. She denies that life fulfils its best 
function in procreation ; she estimates life in it- 
self, for itself; she judges each life as a whole 
complete in itself. 

Take friendship with an old maid ; it is not the 



lO AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 

sunlight indeed, but there is in it a twilight calm, 
a cool, to be enjoyed, which a man can find in no 
other human relation. Parents are friends, but 
they cannot wholly shake off all shadow of con- 
straint that comes from the respect and obedi- 
ence due to their office : they are hedged about by 
the gap that must separate one generation from 
another. Children, likewise, are more and less 
than friends. Man for man has an affection, 
sometimes, like that of Montaigne for La Boetie 
of an intense and exalted character. But friend- 
ship for an old maid. In its comfortable freedom 
from the troubles of intemperate feeling, from the 
duties of a son, a husband, a father, a lover, gives 
the special charm and satisfaction derived from 
a different range of sensibiHties, from the variety 
and interest of another series of thoughts and 
opinions. There is a singular sweetness in this 
contact with the unmating soul, in this pleasant 
introspect into the cool sequestered garden of a 
nunnery. 

In conversation the old maid is not only un- 
hampered by the immediate corollaries of mater- 
nity, diet, hygiene, and all the threads that weave 
the web and woof of home; but she also may 
spread her wings in general freedom. She has no 
deep concern but her own soul, and may risk 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS II 

the consequences of thought, of beHefs and dis- 
behefs, of imaginings and hopes. She enters 
into a conversation for its own sake, accepting 
it as an important matter for the time being com- 
mitted to her charge. And her talk is steeped 
with a fine flavor by her reaHzation of human 
relations; these are not taken for granted nor 
neglected, neither magnified nor belittled, but 
regarded as the principal business on our human 
pilgrimage, as the materials out of which in the 
main human lives are made. 

Old maids are the best readers of books. A 
mother reads a book, whether for knowledge, or 
recreation, with the absent-mindedness of a shop- 
per who holds a ribbon to the light, inwardly 
pondering how its color will match the already pur- 
chased stuff at home. An old maid has no such 
preoccupations ; for her a book stands on its own 
feet, to be judged according to its service to her. 
She reads biography, not for useful examples, 
but for the human interest of a human Hfe; his- 
tory, not as the story of a world in which she is 
but a steward of interests vested in the heir, but 
of her own world ; poetry, as an emanation from 
the spirit of life, not merely as the blossoming 
of the imagination in the mating season, that loses 
its sweetness as soon as the married state has 



12 AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 

become a matter of habit. In fact, all that books 
deal with, like life itself, wears a different aspect 
to the mother and to the old maid, for their morals 
are of a different order : one has the morality of an 
immortal humanity, the other that of the brief- 
lived individual spirit, whose affair is not with the 
future but the present. Manners come specially 
within an old maid's care. They are the outward 
manifestation of all human relations, and in most 
of our relations with our fellows the outward mani- 
festation is more important than the inward senti- 
ment. Life consists in meetings with friends, 
relations, acquaintances, strangers; and the one 
art that can render these random meetings, the 
chance crossings of our paths, anything but a 
burden to hurrying travellers, we commit to no 
special study or training, to no special group of 
guardians and teachers. The old maid is the natu- 
ral mistress of an atelier for manners. A mother's 
manners are rubbed, scratched, and scarred by 
affairs of far greater importance ; the old maid's 
manners have a lightness, a silvery sheen ; and, 
in her lack of preoccupation, she is able to un- 
derstand their social use, she is free to study what 
theories and methods may teach the rest of us 
how to appreciate, at least how to recognize and 
respect the art. 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 13 

There is also the function of education. Watch 
the mother, see her at her board, cutting bread 
and pouring out tumblers of milk for half a dozen 
proofs of her loyalty to her theory; see her 
stitching, basting, darning, or computing next 
year's budget, with her mental eye fixed far on 
generations yet unborn. She, in obedience to her 
maternal instinct, not only feeds, clothes, and 
physics, but she also trains and teaches, drops 
into little open, twittering minds her own mater- 
nal theories ; and even when her children grow 
into adolescence she wishes to guide and govern 
them according to her feelings. Her instinct 
may very well take care of them during the in- 
stinctive period of childhood, for children are 
likely to tread the great highroad of animal life; 
but for her to continue her control when they 
become reasoning beings is another matter. In- 
struction, the art of encouraging rational pro- 
cesses, of developing the character, of catching 
and fixing as a durable possession the winged 
idealism of youth, is a matter not for maternal 
zeal but for cool and sober impartiality. It is 
not in the school that this instruction is best given, 
but in the thousand opportunities that spring 
up in the companionshi«p between the elder sister 
and the little brother, between the aunt and her 



14 AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 

nephew, between the old friend and the young; 
for in that companionship the boy's heart is un- 
locked, his affection leads his mind, and both 
heart and mind become docile and curious. The 
old maid, under the impulse of her celibate ideals, 
seeks to quicken the boy's individual soul, to teach 
him to regard dispassionately our social struc- 
ture (built as it must be upon the animal concep- 
tion of life), and above all to regard himself as 
a creature capable of individual completeness, 
whose essential problem in life is neither to 
procure for himself animal immortality nor to 
possess the earth, but to attain a conception 
of perfection. 

This virginal attitude towards the instruction 
of children seems to illustrate the social use- 
fulness of old maids, their general fitness to be 
critics of society. No one, of course, could sug- 
gest that they should be the only critics of social 
changes ; that task would be out of all proportion 
to their numbers and to their powers, and not 
specially related to the trait that distinguishes 
them from other people. Their service is not to 
do the work of criticism, but to point out the 
right position for criticism to take, the right at- 
titude to adopt. The unencumbered ceHbates 
more easily than others may climb the heights 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 15 

of Impartiality, from where by the dawning light 
of justice, which as yet only lightens those 
heights, they will command a full view of the social 
situation as a whole. Take socialism, for in- 
stance; see wall upon wall, the ancient con- 
ceptions of caste and class and individualism, of 
take-and-keep-that-can, deeply entrenched, honor- 
ably and dishonorably fortified and defended, 
which are built out of the dogma that children shall 
succeed to parents in undiminished privileges and 
prerogatives, and which rest on the foundation of 
animal immortality ; and see outside those walls the 
men that have sons to inherit but no privileges to 
bequeath. What greater need could there be for dis- 
passionate guides detached from all loyalty to that 
deep, fundamental passion of animal immortality ? 
In the social order, mothers, with their fierce ma- 
ternal instincts and rich emotions, with their 
disdain of reason, are constant supporters of pas- 
sion on both sides ; in great measure they deter- 
mine the attitude and the action of men ; so that, 
if only to undo and counteract the influence of 
their married sisters, old maids have much to do 
here. 

The difference between their hands is a fair 
index to the differences between a mother and a 
spinster in creed and deed, in friendship, educa- 



1 6 AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 

tion, or critical usefulness. A mother's hand 
with its tenderness, its caressing, smoothing, sooth- 
ing, promises of warmth after cold, of comfort 
after privation, of happiness after pain, with its 
melodious rhythmic movement which lulls and 
charms the troubled child, is the incomparable 
instrument of the corporal sequence of life ; her 
hand strokes the child as if the whole service of 
the precedent ages had been to shape and per- 
fect it as an instrument of maternal love, as if the 
great artist Time had bent over it, thought over it, 
toiled over it, planned, modelled, devised, and 
imagined, till with the ripeness of perfection, he 
had rested content. The hand of the maid is 
different. Its touch brings no corporeal promises, 
its loneliness almost disturbs the animal within us, 
and yet it seems fraught with something just be- 
yond the power of touch to impart, as if touch 
were struggling up into language, charged with a 
message beyond our comprehension and a sym- 
pathy beyond our reach. Celibate fingers have 
clasped no lover's hand, they have caressed no 
child, they touch with the composure of the 
evening wind, which nevertheless brings to us 
the knowledge that it has touched great things 
afar and will touch great things again, and in be- 
tween touches us. 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 17 

The touch of the old maid's hands, that once 
soothed and comforted our adolescent griefs 
and discontents, explains the deepest service 
which the celibate may render to society. She 
is free to devote herself to an ideal, to the ideal 
of the individual Hfe, to a passionate renunciation 
of the corporal self and the passionate worship of 
Thaty which though we do not know it, or at least 
do not perceive it, yet may be. She has a priestly 
office to fill, not dissimilar to that of her elder 
sisters, the nuns, but more fructifying, more in- 
telligent. It is the mission of her Celibate Order 
to go into the world to combat the original sin of 
our animal origin, which brings with it the greed, 
the grossness, the pride, the injustice, of animals 
that have prevailed in the struggle for existence. 
This Celibate Order is a modern priesthood, and 
our society, whatever its self-satisfaction and its 
self-confidence, is not wholly without the need 
of a priesthood. For the primary function of 
priesthood now, just as it has always been, is to 
maintain and encourage an acceptance of a belief 
in holiness. Priests, in theory at least, consti- 
tute a band set apart from the hurry and sweat 
of the ordinary day; they are hedged about by 
custom, seclusion, and reserve, in order that they 
shall publicly and privately, before men in con- 
c 



1 8 AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 

gregatlons, and among the chance companions of 
daily life, teach by precept and example a belief 
in holiness. 

In former times, and even to-day by virtue of 
inherited ideas, the priesthood has been confined 
to men, but it has always derived its strength 
from the support of celibate women. As Mary 
and Martha to Jesus, as St. Scolastica to her 
brother St. Benedict, as St. Clare to her brother 
in the spirit, St. Francis, so women set apart from 
the current of corporal life have always sustained 
and comforted the priest. The more the course 
of history sweeps the priesthood away from the 
path of its old orbit, the greater the need that 
ministering sisters shall perform the primary func- 
tions of the priest in his stead. The dispassionate, 
unprejudiced celibate must keep alive the belief 
in the creed of holiness. Churches and dogmas 
may go, but the conceptions embodied in the 
sacraments remain. The entry into life is a 
solemn and sacred matter: "La vie n'est ni un 
plaisir ni une douleur, c'est une affaire grave dont 
nous sommes charges, qu'il faut conduire et termi- 
ner avec honneur." If this is true — if life is 
neither for pleasure nor pain, but an affair of con- 
sequence that we must carry on and end with 
honor, who is so well-fitted as the old maid to teach 



AN APOLOGY FOR OLD MAIDS 19 

the child that his business in Hfe is not worldly 
success, nor popular applause, nor achievement 
of obvious bulk, but to live his life as an affair of 
honor. This is the creed of the old maid. She 
asserts the dogma of personal spiritual respon- 
sibility, she proclaims the importance of the in- 
dividual in himself, though the inheritance of 
propulsion, of animal energy, which has descended 
to him from time immemorial, perish with him 
forever; she rejects the doctrine that humanity 
as a whole is the only entity with a meaning, that 
we are but constituent atoms, mere partakers in a 
stream of physical life not our own, links in the 
great procreative chain that binds the first life 
on earth with the last. She is eminently the 
priestess of spiritual life, and as such may render 
the noblest services to humanity. 

All such services proceed from the old maid's 
idealism. By the renunciation of the greatest 
human desire, of the greatest human happiness, 
she has obtained spiritual freedom ; she has not 
misallied her soul, she has kept herself unspotted 
from the world. This renunciation, which looks 
to the vulgar ridiculous, to youth silly, to married 
folks mistaken and melancholy, is no brief or easy 
matter; it is a Purgatory, and the maiden soul 
that passes through it becomes a gracious being. 



DE SENECTUTE 

Cato Major, a man of fifty. 

T [ Students at Harvard College. 

Cato : Welcome, Scipio ; your father and I 
were friends before you were born. And a hearty 
welcome to you, too, Laelius; all your family I 
esteem my kinsmen. Is this the holiday season, 
or how comes it that you have at this time shuffled 
off the coil of academic Hfe ^ 

Scipio : We have a few free days now according 
to the liberal usage of our college, and we have 
come, relying upon your kinship with Laelius, 
and your friendship for my father, to ask you 
some questions. 

Cato : I had thought that seniors of Harvard 
College were more disposed to answer questions 
than to ask them ; but I am truly glad that you 
have come, and as best I can, I will endeavor to 
satisfy your curiosity. 

LAELIUS : We have been disputing, sir, in the 
interim between academic studies, as to the value 
of life ; whether, taking it all in all, life should be 

20 



DE SENECTUTE 21 

regarded as a good thing or not. We are agreed 
that, so far as Youth is concerned, life is well 
worth the living, but we are doubtful whether, if Old 
Age be put into the same balance with Youth, the 
whole will outweigh the good of never having lived. 

SciPio : You see that we have really come to 
ask you about Old Age, for as to Youth, that we 
know of ourselves. 

Cato : About Old Age ! Naturally that has 
been the subject of my meditations, and I will 
gladly impart my conclusions, such as they are. 

SciPio : Thank you very much. I regret to 
say that we are obliged to take the next train 
back to town, so our time is all too short. 

Cato : We have half an hour. I will waste 
no time in prologue. And I shall begin by asking 
Scipio's pardon, for I shall flatly contradict his 
assumption that the young have a knowledge of 
Youth. 

SciPio : Of course we beg you to let neither 
our youth nor our opinions hamper the free ex- 
pression of your views. 

LiSLius : We are all attention, sir. 

I 

Cato : In the first place, my young friends, 
Age has one great pleasure which Youth (in spite 



22 DE SENECTUTE 

of its own rash assumption of knowledge) does 
not have, and that is a true appreciation and 
enjoyment of Youth. 

You who are young know nothing of Youth. 
You merely live it. You run, you jump, you 
wrestle, you row, you play football, you use your 
muscles, without any consciousness of the won- 
derful machinery set in motion. You do not per- 
ceive the beauty of Youth, the light in its eye, the 
coming and going of color in its cheek, the ease 
and grace of its movements. Nor do you appre- 
ciate the emotions of Youth. You are con- 
tented or discontented, merry or sad, hopeful or 
downcast ; but whatever that feeling is, you are 
wholly absorbed in it, you are not able to con- 
sider it objectively, nor to realize how marvelous 
and interesting are the flood and ebb of youthful 
passion. 

In fact, the young despise Youth; they are 
impatient to hurry on and join the ranks of that 
more respectable and respected body, their im- 
mediate seniors. The toddling urchin wishes 
that he were old enough to be the interesting 
schoolboy across the way, who starts unwillingly 
to school; the schoolboy, as he whistles on his 
tedious path, wishes that he were a freshman, so 
splendid in his knowledge, his independence, his 



DE SENECTUTE 23 

possessions, so familiar with strange oaths, so 
gloriously fragrant of tobacco. The freshman 
would be a sophomore. You seniors wish to be 
out in the great world, elbowing your way among 
your fellow men, busy with what seem to you the 
realities of life. Youth feels that it is always 
standing outside the door of a most delectable 
future. 

Appreciation of Youth is part of the domain of 
art. There is no virtuoso like the old man who 
has learned to see the manifold beauties of Youth, 
the charm of motion, the grace of carriage, the 
glory of innocence, the fascination of passion. 
The world of art created by the hand of man has 
nothing that can challenge comparison with the 
masterpieces of Youth. No man, in his own 
boyhood, ever had as much pleasure from run- 
ning across the lawn as he gets from seeing his 
sons run on that very spot; no laughter of his 
own was ever half so sweet to his ears as the 
laughter of his little girl. No man in his youth 
ever understood the significance of the saying, 
"Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." You may 
smile condescendingly, young men, but in truth 
the appreciation of Youth is a privilege and pos- 
session of Old Age. 

L^Lius : I did but smile in sympathy. 



24 DE SENECTUTE 

SciPio: If I understand you aright, Cato, 
Youth is a drama, in which the actors are all 
absorbed in their parts, while Age is the audience. 

Cato : You conceive my meaning. The play 

is worthy for the gods to watch, — it out-Shak- 

speres Shakspere. 

II 

Cato : The second great acquisition that comes 
to Old Age is the mellowing and ripening of life. 

As I look back across the years I can see that 
I and my friends were all what are called in- 
dividualists. We were all absorbed in self, just 
as you young men are. We went through our 
romantic period in which self, with a feather in 
its cap and a red waistcoat, strutted over the 
stage. It monopolized the theatre; everybody 
else — parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, 
cousins, schoolmates — were supernumeraries, 
whose business was to look on while the hero 
recited his lines. With attention concentrated 
all on self, the youth is shy of all other youths, 
of everybody whose insolent egotism may wish to 
push its way upon his stage and interrupt his 
monologue. The / of Youth insists upon its 
exclusive right to emotion, upon its right to 
knowledge of the world at first-hand, upon its 
right to repeat the follies of its father, of its 



DE SENECTUTE 25 

father's father, of all its ancestors. Youth, be- 
wildered by the excitement of self-consciousness, 
can hardly see beyond the boundaries of self. 

Youth is raw and suspicious. It looks askance 
at its neighbors, is indifferent to their lot, 
and delights in solitude, because solitude is 
favorable to egotism. The young are ashamed 
of their humanity. Boys regard the mass of boys 
as if they were of a different species ; they fight 
shy of any general society among themselves; 
they form cliques. The smallest clique is the 
most honorable. And sacredly enshrined in the 
very centre of the inner ring stands the Palla- 
dium of self. You, Scipio, do not associate with 
Gains or Balbus, though they are the best scholars 
in your class ; nor do you, Laelius, frequent any 
but the Claudii. From the vantage-ground, as 
you think, of exclusiveness, you look down upon 
your fellows herded in larger groups. You turn 
up your aristocratic noses at the vulgarity of joy 
in commonalty spread. Your judgments are 
narrow, your prejudices broad ; you are distrust- 
ful and conservative; you are wayward and 
crotchety; you are all for precedent, or all for 
license. You rejoice in foolish divisions, your 
country, your native province, your college, your 
club, your way of doing things; you despise all 



26 DE SENECTUTE 

others, and all their ways. A boy represents the 
babyhood of the race; in him is incarnate the 
spirit of contempt for Barbarians. 

Age is a reaction from the restive individualism 
of Youth. It recognizes the human inability to 
stand alone ; it perceives that the individual is a 
bit broken from the human mass, that our ragged 
edges still maintain the pattern of the break, and 
are ready to fit into the general mass again. 
The old man no longer dwells on the differences 
between one human creature and his fellows; he 
reflects upon their common qualities. He finds 
no solace in isolation; he rejoices in community. 
Youth is supremely conscious of its own sensitive- 
ness, its own palate, its own comfort, it is full of 
individual appetite and greed ; but Age is con- 
scious of humanity, of a universal sensitiveness, 
of palates untouched by delicacies, of bodies un- 
cared for, of souls uncomforted, and its queasy 
stomach cannot bear to be helped tenfold, a 
hundredfold, a thousandfold, while fellow mem- 
bers of the indivisible body human sicken from 
want. 

Age perceives a thousand bonds where Youth 
sees discord. Age sets store by the common good 
of life, it conceives of our common humanity as 
the mere right to share, and of pleasure as shar- 



DE SENECTUTE 27 

ing; it considers humanity partly as an enlarge- 
ment of self, partly as a refuge from self; it 
lightly passes over the differences of speech, of 
accent, of clothes, of ways and customs, which to 
boys like you, taken with the outward aspect of 
the world, seem to erect such insuperable barriers 
between them and their fellows. To Old Age 
the sutures of humanity, that to the youthful 
eye gape so wide, are all grown together, the 
several parts are merged into one whole. 

Of all pleasures, none is so satisfying as the 
full enjoyment of our common humanity. It 
loosens the swaddling clothes that wrap us round ; 
it alone gives us freedom. No doubt this is 
partly due to the nearer approach of death ; the 
chill of night causes the pilgrim to draw nearer 
his fellows and warm himself at the kindly 
warmth of human fellowship. But be the cause 
what it may, the enjoyment of humanity is a 
taste that grows with man's growth ; it is a part 
of the ripening of life, and comes quickest to those 
who ripen in the sun of happiness. 

There is another element in this process of 
mellowing with age. Old Age is intensely aware 
of the delicacy of this human instrument, on 
which fate can play all stops of joy and pain ; it 
feels an infinite concern before the vast sum of 



28 DE SENECTUTE 

human sentience ; it sees in humanity the harvest 
of all the tillage of the past ; it ponders over the 
long stretch of toil, cruelty, suffering, bewilder- 
ment, and terror, of unnumbered generations. 
All along its path life flickers up but to be 
quenched by death. In contemplation of this 
funeral march the old man nuzzles to the breast 
of humanity, and longs for more and more inti- 
mate human communion. To him humanity is 
not a mere collection of individual units, but a 
mighty organism, animated by a common con- 
sciousness, proceeding onward to some far-off^ end, 
with whose destiny his own is inseparably joined. 

Ill 

L^Lius : What do you say to the physical 
weakness of Old Age ? Surely the lack of phys- 
ical vigor is a disadvantage. 

Cato : It is true, Laelius, that Old Age fences 
in a man's activities. We old men are no longer 
free to roam and amuse, or bore, ourselves with 
random interests. Our bounds are set. But with 
the diminishing of space comes what may well 
be a more than corresponding intensity of in- 
terest. The need of boundlessness is one of the 
illusions of youth ; it is a consequence of youth's 
instability, of its unwillingness to hold its atten- 



DE SENECTUTE 29 

tion fixed. The tether of Old Age obliges us to 
fix our attention ; and no matter on what our 
attention is set, we can find there concentrated 
the essential truths of the universe. The adjec- 
tives great and small are not God's words ; they 
mark our inability to throw aside our egoism 
even for a moment. 

The Japanese general who has slain his tens 
of thousands on the plains of Manchuria, squats 
on his hams and contemplates the infinite beauties 
in the iris, as the sunshine flatters it, or the breeze 
bellies out the wrinkled petals of its corolla. Its 
purple deepens, its white emulates the radiance 
of morning, its velvet texture outdoes the royal 
couch of fairyland, its pistil displays all the 
marvel of maternity, its laborious root performs 
its appointed task with the faithfulness of minis- 
tering angels. The armies of Russia and Japan 
could not tell as much concerning the history of 
the universe as does this solitary iris. A garden 
that will hold a lilac bush, a patch of mignonette, 
a dozen hollyhocks, or a few peonies, Is enough 
to occupy a Diocletian. A square yard of vetch 
will reveal the most profound secrets of our 
destiny ; the fermentation of a cup of wine dis- 
closes enough to make a man famous for cen- 
turies; the disease of a silkworm will determine 



30 



DE SENECTUTE 



the well-being of a kingdom ; the denizens in a 
drop of blood cause half the sufferings of hu- 
manity. The achievements of modern science 
merely confirm the intuitions of Old Age. Little- 
ness is as full of interest as bigness. 

Youth has a longing for Sinai heights, for the 
virgin tops of the Himalayas, and the company 
of deep-breathing mountaineers ; this is because 
he cannot see the wonder in common things. 
Blindly impatient with what he has, blindly dis- 
contented with what is about him, he postulates 
the beautiful, the real, the true, in the unattain- 
able. But Old Age delights in what is near at 
hand, it sees that nothing is cut oflF from the 
poetry of the universe, that the Httlest things 
throb with the same spirit that animates our 
hearts, that the word common is a mere subter- 
fuge of ignorance. 

L^Lius : If I conceive your meaning aright, 
Cato, Old Age is, through greater understanding, 
nearer the truth than Youth. 

Cato : Yes, Age understands that such reve- 
lation as may be vouchsafed to man concerning 
the working of the will of the Gods needs not be 
sought on Olympus, but in whatever spot man is. 
Earth, the waters, the air, and all the starry 
space, are waiting to communicate the secrets of 



DE SENECTUTE 3 1 

the Gods to the understanding of man. Many 
secrets they will reveal; and many, perhaps, 
they will never disclose. 

IV 

SciPio : Excuse me, Cato, but are you not, in 
substance, claiming the advantages of religion, and 
is not religion as open to Youth as to Old Age ? 

Cato : By no means, Scipio ; Old Age is 
more religious than Youth. I do not speak of 
the emotional crises that come upon young men 
and young women in early youth; those crises 
seem too closely related to physical growth and 
development to be religious in the same sense in 
which Old Age is religious. That the emotional 
crises of Youth may bear as truthful witness to 
the realities of the universe as the temperate 
religion of Old Age, I do not deny. The God 
that Youth sees by the light of its emotional fires 
may be the real God, but that image of God is 
transitory, it appears in fire and too often dis- 
appears in smoke. The image of God that ap- 
pears to Old Age is a more abiding image; it 
reveals itself to experience and to reason instead 
of to the sudden and brief conviction of vision. 
Old Age finds God more in its own image, calm, 
infinitely patient, not revealed merely by the 



32 DE SENECTUTE 

vibrant intensity of passion, but in the familiar 
and the commonplace. To Old Age the com- 
mon things of life declare the glory of God. 

Common things affect different minds dif- 
ferently; yet to most minds certain familiar 
phenomena stand out conspicuous as matter for 
reflection. Most extraordinary of all common 
things is human love. Throughout the universe 
of the stellar sky and the universe of the infinitely 
little, so far as we can see, there is perpetual 
movement, change, readjustment; and, except 
for our animal life, the whole machinery whirls 
along without a throb of emotion, without a 
touch of affection. Why should not men have 
been mechanical, swept into being and borne 
onward, by the same energies, in the same iron- 
bound way .? Even if consciousness, unfolding out 
of the potential chaos that preceded man, was able 
to wheedle an existence from Necessity, why was 
it expedient to add love ? Would not mechanical 
means serve the determined ends of human life, 
and impel us to this action and to that, without 
the need of human affection ? Human affection 
is surely a very curious and interesting device. 

And if the world must be peopled, and the 
brute law of propagation be adopted in a uni- 
verse of chemistry and physics, why was it neces- 



DE SENECTUTE 33 

sary to cover it with visions of " love and of honor 
that cannot die," and to render the common man 
for the moment worthy of an infinite destiny ? 

Then there is also the perplexity of beauty. 
Why to creatures whose every footstep is deter- 
mined by the propulsions of the past, should a 
flower, a tuft of grass, a passing cloud, a bare tree 
that lifts the tracery of its branches against a sun- 
set sky, cause such delight ? Descended from an 
ancestry that needed no lure of beautiful sight 
or of pleasant sound to induce it to live its ap- 
pointed life, why should mankind become so 
capriciously sensitive ? 

Or consider human happiness. Here, for ex- 
ample, I live, in this little cottage that seems to 
have alighted, like a bird, on the slope of this 
gentle hill. Red and white peonies grow before 
the door, enriching the air with their fragrance. 
They charm both me and the bees. In yonder 
bush beside the door a chipping-sparrow sits 
upon her nest ; and in the swinging branch of the 
elm tree overhead two orioles rear their brood, 
and as they flash by, their golden colors delight 
the human beings that watch them. Look over 
that stone wall, and mark how its flat line gives 
an incomparable effect to the landscape. See our 
New England fields dotted with New England 

D 



34 DE SENECTUTE 

elms; and far beyond see those white-sailed 
schooners scud before the boisterous wind. The 
farmer's boy, who fetches milk and eggs, left me 
that nosegay of wild flowers. Look ! Look ! 
See how the whiteness of that cloud glorifies 
the blue of the sky. Is it not strange that 
all these things, that go about their own bus- 
iness, should, by the way, perform a work of 
supererogation and give us so much unnecessary 
pleasure ? 

The young do not see or do not heed these com- 
mon things ; they are busy with their own emotions. 
Youth is a time of tyrannical demands upon the 
universe. It expects a perpetual banquet of 
happiness, and at the first disillusion charges the 
universe with falsehood and ingratitude. It no 
sooner discovers that all creation is not hurrying 
to gratify its impulses, than it cries out that all 
creation is a hideous thing. It arraigns the uni- 
verse; it draws up an indictment of countless 
crimes. The long past becomes one bloody 
tragedy. Dragons of the prime rend one an- 
other, creature preys upon creature, all things 
live at the expense of others, and death is the 
one reality. All the records of the earth tell a 
tale of bloody, bestial cruelty. The globe is 
growing cold ; man shall perish utterly, all his 



DE SENECTUTE 35 

high hopes, all his good deeds, all his prayers, 
all hts love, shall become as if they had never 
been. And Youth, because the universe for a 
moment seems to neglect it, in a Promethean 
ecstasy defies the powers that be. 

But Old Age, rendered wiser by the mellow- 
ing years, concerns itself less with the records of 
palaeontology and the uttermost parts of the uni- 
verse, than with matters at closer range and 
more within its comprehension. It fixes its eye 
less on death than on life. It considers the phe- 
nomena of love, of beauty, of happiness, and the 
factors that have wrought them, and its thoughts 
trace back the long, long sequence of causes that 
lie behind each contributing factor; they follow 
them back through recorded time, back through 
the ages of primitive man, through the dim 
times of the first stirrings of organic life, through 
vast geological periods, back to chaos and old 
night. They follow each contributory factor out 
through the universe, to the uttermost reaches 
of space, beyond the boundaries of perception ; 
and everywhere they find those contributory 
causes steadily proceeding on their several ways 
through the vast stretches of space and time, and 
combining with other factors from other dark 
recesses of the unknown, in order, at last, to pro- 



36 DE SENECTUTE 

duce love, beauty, happiness, for such as you 
and me. Consider, you young men, who pass 
these miracles by as lightly as you breathe, this 
marvellous privilege of life, the infinite toil and 
patience that has made it what it is, and then, if 
you dare, call the power that animates the uni- 
verse cruel. 

V 

SciPio : I perceive, Cato, that you believe in a 
God, a God in sympathy with man, and I grant 
— Laelius, too, will grant — that such a belief, if 
a characteristic of Old Age, does indeed give Old 
Age one great advantage over Youth. 

Cato : No, I cannot claim that a belief in God 
is a necessary accompaniment of Old Age, but I 
think that Old Age is far more likely than Youth 
to dwell upon the considerations that fit in with 
such a belief. 

To Youth all the energy of the universe is in- 
explicable, the things we behold are the products 
of blind forces ; but to Old Age the essential ele- 
ment in the universe is the potential character of 
its infinitely little constituent parts. Out of the 
dust came the human eye, up from the happy 
combination of the nervous system came the 
human mind, and with the passage of time has 
come the new organic whole, humanity. Do not 



DE SENECTUTE 37 

these phenomena hint at a divine element in the 
potential energies of the universe ? What is all 
this motion and turmoil, all the ceaseless turn- 
ings and tossings of creation, but restless dis- 
content and an endeavor to produce a higher 
order ? Our human love, beauty, and happiness 
are less to be explained by what has gone before 
than by what is to come. You cannot explain the 
first streaks of dawn by the darkness of the night. 
All the processes of change — gases, vapors, 
germs, human souls — are the perturbations of 
aspiration. This vibrant universe is struggling 
in the throes of birth. As out of the dust has 
come the human soul, so out of the universe shall 
come a divine soul. God is to be the last fruits 
of creation. Out of chaos He is evolving. 

You would laugh at me, Scipio, if it were not 
for your good manners. Wait and learn. Belief 
in deity is, in a measure, the privilege of us old 
men. Age has lost the physical powers of Youth, 
and no one will dispute that the loss is great, but 
that loss predisposes men to the acceptance of 
religious beliefs. Physical powers, of themselves, 
imply an excessive belief in the physical universe ; 
muscles and nerves, in contact with unyielding 
things, exaggerate the importance of the physical 
world. Throughout the period of physical vigor 



38 DE SENECTUTE 

the material world is a matter of prime conse- 
quence; but to an old man the physical world 
loses its tyrannical authority. The world of 
thought and the world of affection rise up and 
surpass in interest the physical world. In these 
worlds the presence of God is more clearly dis- 
cernible than in the material world ; but if He 
is in them. He will surely come into the material 
world. 

Even now, here and there, His glory is visible. 
A mother, at least, cannot believe that the throbs 
of her heart over her sick child are of no greater 
significance than the dropping of water or the 
formation of a crystal. The presence of deity 
has reached her heart ; in course of time, it will 
also reach the water and the crystal. If matter 
of itself has produced the passion of human love, 
it surely may be said, without presumption, to be 
charged with potential divinity. 

Old Age cares less and less for the physical 
world ; it lives more and more in the worlds of 
thought and of affection. It does not envy 
Youth, that lives so bound and confined by 
things physical. But you have been very patient. 
Make my compliments to your families, and per- 
haps in part to Harvard College, on your good 
manners, and remember when you, too, shall be 



DE SENECTUTE 39 

old, to have the same gentle patience with Youth 
that you now have with Old Age. 

SciPio : Thank you, Cato. If we are not con- 
vinced, we desire to be. 

L^Lius : Yes, indeed, we now doubt that those 
whom the Gods love die young. 

Cato : You must hurry or you will miss your 
train. Good-bye. 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 



The religion of the future is occupying men's 
minds. 1 hey are right to think of it, to talk of it, 
and hope for it; their leaders, as leaders toward 
the new have always been, are men of the pioneer 
sort, animated by a need of room, eager to avoid 
and escape from the restraining bounds, the 
narrow quarters, in which the old centuries have 
lodged us. They are brave; they set their faces 
toward the new, and feel the fresh salt breezes of 
the unknown sea blow full in front. Their cour- 
age is none the less praiseworthy because at times 
it seems to shine the more from contrast with the 
dull hues of a sicklier liver; nor is their self-re- 
liance less to be admired because it is quickened 
by a knowledge of the self-helplessness of others. 
They are leaders; their business is to lead, and 
one of their duties is to prod the laggards and the 
stay-at-homes. They have so much right upon 
their side, that they may well be excused for 
thinking they have it all. 

40 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 41 

The need of change, of cutting away old, time- 
eaten parts of religion, of replacing that which is 
cut away by modern notions, of substituting 
dogmas that will stand the hammers of logic and 
science for those that dissolve impalpable before 
a child's knowledge of physics and history, is and 
may well be ample justification for a wide sweep 
of the pioneer axe. They, however, by the very 
thoroughness of their devastation, force the issue 
of the value of this thoroughness. Their trenchant 
ploughshares uncover our holes and crevices, 
and stir the dispossessed "wee, sleekit, cowrin*, 
tim'rous" acceptors of old ideas into an attitude 
of asking for further proof of this light-hearted 
confidence in the new. Is there not some small 
remnant of religious use left in the old home .? 
Have the emigrants got it all stowed away in their 
lockers .? 

For if, by this uncompromising thoroughness, 
they raise a comparison between themselves 
and us, if they vaunt their riches in contrast 
to our poverty, they must be scrupulous to 
measure, and set apart, the things that are 
theirs on one side and the things that are ours 
on the other. There must be no confusion. 
The produce of the new land whither they go 
is theirs; the produce of the old home and its 



42 THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

garden belongs to us. Let us divide clearly and 
mark the division. 

The new religion has a *'god"; but at the very 
outset we may ask, What right have they to take 
our name ? How can they strip that name of a 
hundred associations that come thronging, — 
the belief of good men, the hopes of the unhappy, 
the trust of the valiant, the passion of those who 
set their hearts upon the things that are not of this 
world? What is their "god"? They feel the 
pulse and throb of countless forces, they feel their 
sensibilities played upon, their consciousness 
awake and receptive, their fires of life fed with 
fuel; they assert that all these unknown com- 
motions, these stirrings, waves, fluctuations, 
movements, are the results of contact with in- 
numerable manifestations of one primal force, 
and they say he is their god. But this very zeal 
for unification, for oneness, for an all-embracing 
whole, is of our creation ; we of the past have 
created that. They of the future have only a 
vast aggregate of like elements, if even they have 
that. They combine and mould together in one 
form these inorganic, intolerant forces, and then 
they wrap this moulded image up in our emotions, 
in the reverence and awe that we of the old home 
have made. Reverence, awe, love, are the mak- 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 43 

ings of the past, the handiwork of ignorance, of 
superstition, of beHef, of faith ; they are ours to 
deck our altars and our idols. 

The "god" of the future is but a concatenated 
aggregate of unknown forces, and both aggrega- 
tion and concatenation are assumptions. They 
claim reverence for the reign of law, with its uni- 
form and measured impartiality, in place of the 
arbitrary and tyrannical actions of a jealous God ; 
but they have no right to reverence. Even if 
they will kneel to the downward fall of an apple, 
and the elliptical orbits of the planets, even if they 
will sing hymns to the swell and ebb of the tide, 
and praise the union of hydrogen and oxygen, they 
have no right to take our words, our associations, 
our frippery of old thoughts and emotions. Un- 
less they are prepared to bestow an adequate 
allotment of ecstasy on each electric volt, they 
have no right to clap all the volts together in one 
symbolic whole and bow down before them. The 
only rational attitude toward the "god" of the 
future is distrust. That god must be utterly 
dehumanized and given its due, no more, no less. 
"It" should inspire such amazement and respect 
as generalizations of the human mind, made in the 
laboratory or the lecture-room, are entitled to. 
"It" must be charged with whatever sin and 



44 THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

suffering, whatever pain and distress, there may 
be throughout the universe. "It" may well be 
feared by the timid and should be defied by the 
bold. "It" cannot attach to itself any of the 
emotions that the religion of the past has called 
into being. We are men, and the relation of hu- 
manity toward the universal forces is one of 
enmity. We must conquer or die. We must 
outwit them, control them, counteract them, or 
they will beat us down under their feet. There 
is no evidence of any friendliness toward us ; those 
forces, for which the reign of law is emotionally 
claimed, will destroy us according to their laws 
unless we can control them. We are human, they 
are non-human ; this is all we know. 

In this respect the reformers have taken from 
our stock what belongs to us; but by their own 
doctrine they may not take a word, — the word 
of words, — transfer it to their stock, and then 
pretend that they have taken a mere term of 
dialectics, as if they could leave behind the con- 
notation which is its essence, and strip off all 
vestiges of those yearnings which semper, uhique 
et ah omnibus have given the word god all its 
significance. Then on this borrowed word they 
seek to build the religion of the future. 

What attribute of religion can they hang upon 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 



45 



it, they who have cut themselves loose from all the 
network of affection that man's history has 
woven about the God of the past ? They cannot 
take duty. Their god has nothing in common 
with duty ; the two conceptions are antagonistic. 
Their god acts on motives that we can neither 
know nor conjecture ; this present manifestation 
of contemporaneous phenomena that we call our 
universe comes from we know not where, and goes 
we know not whither. All is dark. But duty is 
plain and readily understood. Duty is a human 
conception, a means for human good, a human 
contrivance in the long war of humanity against 
the forces of evil that encompass us on every side. 
Good is that which is good to humanity; evil is 
that which is evil to it. The unconscious forces 
that nourish germs of disease, that rob us of health, 
of happiness, of life, that cause untoward heat and 
cruel cold, that "hurl the lightnings and that wing 
the storms," that create venomous reptiles and 
poison-bearing insects, that cool the old earth and 
threaten our race with a miserable end, are to our 
human desires wholly evil. They are all law- 
abiding, and in them as well as in us lies a portion 
of the dignity of the universe ; and yet we hate 
them. Our duties are toward our parents and 
children, toward our wives and husbands, toward 



46 THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

our fellow townsfolk, toward such as chance may 
render our neighbors, toward our horses and our 
dogs. Out of earthly relations our duties are 
begotten ; but out of what shall we create a notion 
of duty toward this "god," or how shall we, 
except by making ourselves mere fate-led puppets, 
identify duty with its will ? Our human duties, 
our sense of solidarity, our consciousness of com- 
mon joys and sorrows, are not affirmations of this 
new "god," but a denial of it. If we shall awake, 
as the reformers say we shall, to a keener apprecia- 
tion of the need of standing by one another, of 
working together, it will be because we perceive 
that we are alone, unaided, sailing in one great 
ship over an unknown sea. The sense of human 
duty may grow stronger as we shall cease to rely 
on outside help, we may become more self-reliant 
under the new gospel; but self-reliance is not 
religion. 

^ II 

The religion of the past is of a different order. 
It was born of ignorance ahd superstition, nursed 
by credulity and need, fostered and tended by evil 
times, by misery, disappointment, fear, and death. 
Nothing could be further from a rational and 
scientific explanation of this extraordinary phe- 
nomenon, life, than the God of old. He grew with 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 47 

the growth of our race, he acquired attributes as 
we progressed, he gradually became high, holy, 
and loving; and, when, in our deeper need to 
feel communion with Him, He put on human shape 
and shared our common human experiences, man 
loved Him passionately. He is the creation of 
many great hearts; and because humanity has 
made Him, we love Him. Humanity has loved 
its beautiful creation ; and, rounding out the 
allegory, created a human mother for its offspring. 
We feel our weakness, our ignorance, our incapac- 
ity to stand alone, and we cling to that which we 
have created. 

Yet because we can see no further than our own 
handiwork, because we seem to have been creating 
something out of nothing, is it necessarily so ? 
And if it is so, was the handiwork a waste of labor 
and of love .? Is the image of a loving God with a 
human heart, botched and marred though it is by 
the glosses of churchmen, necessarily an unservice- 
able illusion ? How are we to know that it is an 
illusion ? What is this world ? What are illu- 
sions, what is the line that divides them from other 
impressions, and are not illusions as worth while 
as other things I Are they not oddly like reality, 
and have they not their special uses .? What is 
our conscious life, but a storehouse of illusions. 



48 THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

and what are our senses but mechanical doors to 
let more illusions in ? Why should we not, for our 
comfort, our well-being, our ennoblement, create 
one illusion the more ? 

Or ought not our old religion to be called a work 
of art rather than a cluster of illusions ? Is it 
not the incomparable work of the imagination, 
upon which, as upon speech, all men have been 
at work ? Here and there, indeed, great men 
have altered the design, remodelling sometimes 
the fundamental plan; while all the time, here 
and there, according to their personal tastes and 
capacities, the mass of believers have been adding 
touches : filling in the background, heightening 
the color, strengthening a line, or deepening a 
shadow. Is not this work of art a beautiful thing 
in itself, with all its rudeness and crudity ; and is 
it not so entwined and entangled with the history 
of the human race that any divorce between them 
must be a maim ? 

They may prove without any great fear of 
opposition that the tribal god was a barbarous con- 
ception, that a national god is at times an irrational 
and mischievous hinderance to the progress of civ- 
ilization. But why not proceed, as nature does, 
from seed to shoot, from shoot to stalk, from stalk 
to trunk, drinking in from sunshine and rain new 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 49 

properties and powers, till the climber climbing 
to its topmost bough sees ever further and further ? 
If we have grown, the tribal god has aided our 
growth. In the home, in the school, in the 
counting-room, in the court-house, on the battle- 
field, or in the penitential cell, he or his successors 
have helped men and women, boys and girls, 
to fight the good fight. When Israel conquered 
Moab, when Greece defeated Persia, when con- 
federate Europe beat back the Huns, when a 
high-aspiring soul has turned away from tempta- 
tion, were not these victories touched at least with 
the glory of divine achievement ? It is important 
for the right to prevail, even if in the doubtful 
balance the right leans to one side only by the 
least fraction of a scruple. Whenever the side 
impregnated with a greater degree of high purpose 
and aspiring will has overcome the other, that has 
been a victory for the divine cause. Whenever 
a man has sacrificed himself or what he loved most, 
in obedience to the command of what he held 
holy, whenever he has renounced the easy pleasure 
for the hard denial, whenever the little per- 
sistent instincts of sympathy and human fellow- 
ship have triumphed over his passions, there the 
tribal god, the national god, the sectararian god, 
or the human god, has been by his side, helping 



JO THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

sustaining, encouraging. Wherever men have felt 
that the issues before them were fraught with 
a significance greater than the balance and adjust- 
ment of appetite and expedience, there one of the 
old gods was at work. The God of the past was 
human. He cared for men, their tears, their en- 
deavors, their love, their obedience ; but the god of 
the future is to have no human sympathies. From 
now on, man is not to rely on God but on himself, 
and we are now to watch the deceitful vapors, 
that have set themselves together in the shape of 
walls, bastions, ramparts, and bannered citadel, 
dissolve in the white light of disillusion. The 
real and the non-real must be set sharply apart. 

The old religion had a mass of additions, accre- 
tions, agglutinations, gathered to it as it rolled 
along the path of history. These were unjustifi- 
able in any logical system of theology ; but why 
should we adopt a manner of judgment that judges 
according to origins ? Why should we not judge 
according to results ? That has been an old habit 
of mankind. When men felt a relief, an enlarge- 
ment, a revival, a more potent energy, a new and 
kindling vigor, they ascribed these accessions of 
life to an animating power of goodness, and fell 
upon their knees and worshipped it. They 
invented the word sacred to define, as well as a 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 51 

single word might do, these animating influences ; 
and when, after an habitual association of the felt 
effects and the imagined causes, they desired to 
experience again the remembered blessings, they 
invoked the symbol of these causal circumstances 
and hastened on the consequence. They estab- 
lished ceremonies in the hope of putting themselves 
and their children in the way of receiving the 
benignant gifts of the Spirit. They kept old 
traditions, usages, terms, and practices, as a 
grown man calls his father and his mother "papa" 
and "mamma"; and by unreasonable association 
of sentiments they swelled childish emotions into 
manly deeds. It may even be that these super- 
stitious imaginings of the past were instinctive 
recognitions of forces uncomprehended, happy 
reachings out for spiritual sustenance, and erron- 
eous only in the explanation of their nature; 
that they really found a way to draw upon secret 
sources of power and life. 

What is less reasonable than baptism .? But if 
a man has been baptized, and his father, and his 
father's father, and his again, then the memory 
of these repeated dedications of young life, — the 
memory of young and radiant mothers praying 
and smiling as they prayed, — from a time back 
beyond all records, renders the ceremony more 



52 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 



potent in its effect upon the imagination than any 
argument drawn from common sense. Such 
ceremonies do not square with reason; they 
quicken deep emotions and bring their rude bar- 
barian strength to the support of right doing. 
Men who stroll across the fields of Gettysburg and 
mark the contours of the hills, the slope of the 
falling ground, and feel their feet press the very 
sods pressed by the dead and dying on those 
three great days, do not ask whether on that 
summit a factory might be built, on this meadow 
grain planted, and along that ancient line of 
fence a highway laid out; they stop, and 
highly resolve to quit themselves like men on 
whatever field the battle of life may chance to 
range them. 

If men are moved to adhere to the cause of right 
because of visions and dreams of other men who 
died long ago, if they are cheered and emboldened 
because they wear a uniform, follow a flag, and 
tramp to the rolling of sticks beaten on taut pig- 
skin, why not keep these beneficial supports, 
irrational though they are .? A thousand chances 
every day remind us that we are not creatures of 
reason, but act willy-nilly in response to innu- 
merable stimuli that prick us from we know not 
where. 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 53 

Marriage under the new dispensation will not 
be a sacrament. But is not this a question of 
words ? How is a man, in the full flood of ro- 
mantic passion, going to formulate with any pre- 
tense of fitness the sentiments that draw him high 
above the meannesses of life, unless he calls on 
God to witness, and vows to love, honor, and 
cherish, forever ? These rites are stammering 
efforts to give expression to sentiment. Never 
again is God revealed so present to man and 
woman, never again is a moment in their wedded 
lives so sacred. No man knows a sentiment 
except at the moment when he feels It ; the most 
vivid imagination falls hopelessly short of another 
man's passion or even of his own remembered 
emotions. If passion is to be expressed in form 
or word, it must be by him whom the passion at 
the moment possesses ; and to him love is of God 
and eternal. 

In the new religion there are to be no interme- 
diaries between God and man, none to whom, by 
self-dedication and long ministration, the habits 
of self-sacrifice, of aspiration, of willing unworldly 
things, of obeying high impulses, shall have 
become a power and an authority fit to help those 
whom the common occupations of life encumber; 
none to whom music, poetry, gratitude, and love 



54 THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

are daily cares, to whom the old trappings of 
holiness are especially dear. God will be so 
immanent in nitrogen and carbon, in drop of 
water and pufF of smoke, that nothing else will be 
necessary; we need no intermediary to feel heat 
or cold, to catch waves of light and sound, and 
such other vibrations as do not elude us. The 
alderman will register the names of our children, 
the mayor our contracts for the reproduction of our 
kind, the sheriff's deputy may superintend the 
cremation of our bodies. Churches, purged from 
superstition, fetiches, and idolatry, will be turned 
into parlors for summer lectures, as in the golden 
age swords were beaten into ploughshares; and 
chapels will become reading-rooms with scientific 
tracts on the tables and the best literature on the 
shelves. Surgeons, physicians, dentists, and other 
health officers of society, will satisfy the rational 
needs of mankind; and the ignorant yearnings, 
the unintelligible appetites, that have cried aloud 
for a draught that shall satisfy them, will atrophy 
for lack of pampering. 

Ill 

Above all, in this new religion there shall be 
no mystery. Along the periphery of this luminous 
spot, which our senses shine upon, we shall, to be 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 55 

sure, still continue to come into direct contact 
with the dark and the unknown ; but we shall let 
it alone. Like well-behaved children, we shall 
not concern ourselves with what is not set on the 
table before us. The old, foolish, passionate cry 
demanding to know why, why, why, do I suffer 
pain ? Why am I called out of the tranquil insen- 
tient mass into this sentient being, merely to feel 
my nerves quiver and shrivel in the fires of grief, 
disappointment, sorrow, jealousy, and shame .? 
Why, oh, why, am I .? And what art Thou, dread 
power by whose will I live ^ These futile ques- 
tions, obviously asked far too often, will be 
dropped. In fact, mystery is to be Ignored. 
Men, who in love and longing fling themselves 
away from the things they know on the bosom 
of mystery, stretching their arms toward the great 
dark, are no longer to be tolerated. All the cor- 
relatives of mystery — awe, reverence, holiness 
— must depart together with mystery. And yet 
what is knowledge, what at any moment and how 
large is the content of consciousness ? Are we 
to live, incurious islanders, forever satisfied to turn 
our faces inland and forswear the long encircling 
beach, where the waves of mystery forever beat 
and ocean winds bend the fringing trees, shaking 
their tops to sibylline utterance ? 



56 THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

And is our reasoning self the most intimate 
part of us, the most permanent and central ? 
Is that the axis of our revolving life, to which 
moment by moment new sensations are fastened, 
and from which memories are sloughed off? 
Is that the tube through which the wind of life 
passes, catching its melody from chance stops by 
the way ? Why then does the call of a bird, or the 
note of a violin, stir us so profoundly ? There is a 
pleasure in the dark, a joy in the night, a relief 
from the inadequacy of waking, a freedom from 
the thraldom of sight and speculation. It is 
only through mystery and in mystery that man 
has the feeling of buoyancy, of an all-embracing 
being that bears him up, of an imagined contact 
with something unfathomable. In the light of 
day, staring at the outward aspects of such things 
as are within his horizon, he feels the littleness 
of his possessions, of his interests, of himself and 
his universe, he feels their insipidity and futility. 

All the phenomena that astronomy, physics, 
chemistry, open their windows on- derive their 
qualities from man. The stars and the interstellar 
spaces are glorious and awe-inspiring, because 
man is here to feel the glory and the awe. The 
minutest elements that reveal themselves to the 
chemist are marvellous because of our ignorance. 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 57 

This universe, unreflected in any intelligence, 
moving unknown, unthinking, and unthought, 
would be an immeasurable ennui. It is the 
human relation that flatters the mountain-tops 
of science and gilds its discoveries with heavenly 
alchemy. The marvellous is merely our first 
acquaintance with the unfamiliar. But mystery 
is out of the category of the marvellous. Man, 
in face of that which transcends his intelligence, 
experiences a rest from eflPort, a peace; he feels 
the impotence of vexation and of striving. A 
pervasive calm that cannot be shaken wraps 
him round ; he is free from the importunity of his 
senses. Neither sight, nor sound, nor movement, 
nor dimension, nor scope for activity, disturbs 
him; nothing is present but a fading conscious- 
ness that self seems slowly drifting from him. 
As when a long-drawn note upon a violin is held 
until the hearer no longer hears whether it con- 
tinues or has ceased, and this uncertainty fills 
his attention; so man, confronting the mystery 
that encompasses all existence, absorbed and self- 
forgetful, insensibly doubts whether it and he are 
or are not. As the mind is refreshed and inspired 
by sleep, by exile from things and images, by 
submersion in self-unconsciousness, so, too, in the 
presence of mystery, loosed from the oppression 



58 THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

of the familiar and the known, lifted above the 
friction and the fret of petty cause and conse- 
quence, the mind, grasping nothing, touching 
nothing, feeling but freedom, is refreshed and 
inspirited. 

From this bath of his soul, man comes back to 
earth and daily life purified and ennobled. The 
trivial has a glint of some far-ofF meaning, the 
common loses the texture of its commonness, and 
our animal life — the needs and appetites of the 
body — becomes the symbol of something that 
shall justify toil and sacrifice. It is for this that 
creeds have gone beyond the verge of common- 
sense and practical understanding in their endeav- 
ors to find some symbol to express the incompre- 
hensible. And if you once grant the significance 
of mystery, — that it transcends experience 
and cannot be classed in this order of phe- 
nomena or in that, — then why not let each man 
adjust his relations with it as he thinks or feels 
to be the best for him I Let him express his 
approach, his envisagement, his reactions, all his 
relations with mystery, in such forms and ways as 
he pleases ; let him take such aids to further what 
to him is a desirable state of being as his experience 
shall counsel. There is still, for some people at 
least, in the vaulted nave, in the exultant, heaven- 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 



59 



ward leap of the pointed arches, in the glory of 
color, in the long, deep rolling of the organ, a 
power that awakens dormant capacities for wor- 
ship. Even in the little wayside church, where 
friends have met together for years, where the last 
words have been said over the well-beloved dead, 
where vows have been plighted, where babies have 
cooed at the minister while the young parents 
gazed proudly at each other, there is a touch of 
poetry that pushes back some bolt in the heart and 
opens the door to higher purposes. "Open wide 
the door of my heart that Thou mayst enter in," 
said St. Augustine. What matter, so long as the 
door is opened, whether it is music, liturgy, ritual, 
the blending sweetness of sad and happy memories, 
or some rational key, that opens the door } 

Another distinction between the old religion 
and the new is the attitude toward pain. Under 
the old, often, oddly enough it is true, pain was 
regarded as the gift of God, something to be 
accepted with humiHty and resignation. Death, 
disease, disappointment were, if not marks of 
special favor, marks of special interest. Under 
the new religion, pain is a base inconvenience, 
an ignoble discomfort, to be removed speedily 
and completely. Nobody will quarrel with the 
attempt to remove pain as speedily and as 



6o THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

completely as possible. Pain hinders living and 
loving, and is an evil. But we have not yet 
succeeded in removing pain, and there is no 
prospect that we shall. Death, disease, discon- 
tent, coolness betwixt lovers, the indifference of 
friends, the broken promises of life, are not to be 
got rid of. How had we best look upon such pains 
while we endure them ? Shall we regard them as 
a tear in a garment, a leak in a pipe, as a mere base 
inconvenience, or may we do as the old religion 
teaches, and try to climb up on them as steps to a 
fuller and larger life .? The place of pain in natural 
philosophy, whether it be a link in the chain of 
human action or a mere register to record a back- 
ward step, is not of great consequence to us. If 
from pain we can call forth resolutions that free 
us from the bonds of lust, of gluttony, or other 
bestiality, if we can use it as a background from 
which the colors of life stand out in greater charm, 
or as the death of old life from which newer and 
better life springs up, why should we not let the 
gains shine back upon that liberating and fertiliz- 
ing pain, and dignify it with the name of blessing .? 
Why not deem it good in its own bitter way as the 
Christians do, and let gratitude cluster about It, 
and praise It as a condition and a help to the birth 
of higher life ? 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 6l 

To reject this old use of pain because it is 
superstitious in origin, to refuse to make it our 
servant because we cannot banish it, is wasteful, 
and, being wasteful, blameworthy. Does not 
the desirable future, the happy land beyond the 
horizon of the present, show more clearly to the 
spirit in pain ? Does this not see — purified from 
the distractions, the temptations, the misconcep- 
tions that dog the steps of happiness and content 
— what is right, what is just, what is good ? To 
strike from human history the records of pain, the 
refinement, the ennoblement of man by suffering, 
when that has been accepted as a means of grace, 
would cheapen that history indeed. Self-sacri- 
fice, too, must go. Its remote prototype, human 
sacrifice, its closer analogies, the holocaust of 
beeves, the blood of goats, the burning of incense, 
are common arguments to show us how supersti- 
tious the practice is. 

The new theology is surely right in this : We 
must either reject or accept the principle of sacri- 
fice. If we reject the principle, we commit our- 
selves to the doctrine of the right of each to the 
fullest enjoyment of life that he can attain. No 
man is to make way for anything less strong than 
himself, or to sacrifice himself, or anything that 
is his, for another's good. If we accept the 



62 THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

principle, we can ill justify our course by reason. 
For we cannot consistently stop at arbitrary limits 
to sacrifice, as for the good of a higher being, of the 
community, of society at large, saying that so far 
sacrifice is good but no further. And if we carry 
it out to logical completeness we also run foul of 
reason; for it is contrary to reason to sacrifice 
every member of a society for the sake of all ; and 
it is still more absurd for each generation to sacri- 
fice itself for the sake of the next ; for then the long 
results of sacrifice would accumulate for the ulti- 
mate descendants of the human race, until the last 
man should finally experience the last satisfaction 
in solitude. 

We can justify sacrifice only on the principle 
that there is in sacrifice some element of good for 
the sacrificial victim, some breath of a larger life, 
some draught of a nobler existence, some light from 
a higher sphere, if only for a time, how short 
soever. Society may, indeed, punish its members 
who refuse to sacrifice themselves for the common 
weal so sternly that they shall be afraid to dis- 
obey; but then the doctrine of self-sacrifice will 
be destroyed. Or, society may inculcate by edu- 
cation a willingness to die or sufl^er for the general 
good, but that is by an appeal to superstition and 
bigotry of an order wholly analogous to those 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 6$ 

religious superstitions which the new theology 
rejects. Unless we become pure egotists, we are 
forced to come very close to the Christians ; for 
what reason is there for preferring altruism to 
egotism other than the witness of experience that 
to common men altruism offers a deeper and more 
intense emotional life ? 

Under the old religion, sacrifice was not judged 
by its origin. It was regarded as justifying itself. 
For, if what was sacrificed was a mere passing 
pleasure, a desire, an ambition, then, the appetite 
once passed, the sacrifice left barely a ripple on 
the memory, and the sense of self-mastery, of an 
easy wheel that lightly turns the ship, amply 
repaid the loss. If the sacrifice was serious, even 
to death, it was an oblation to duty and to the God 
from whom duty emanated. Sacrifice was not a 
loss; it was at most a displacement, a changing 
about, a shift ; it added a more than compensating 
increase of power to some other member of the 
mystic body of which the willing victim was a 
part. He served his God, and his God blessed 
him. When the soul labors under an overwhelm- 
ing emotion, words are idle and music is weak, 
and there is no voice to express the joy and rap- 
ture of love and worship, except sacrifice. It 
sounds unreasonable, but if we delve deep into 



64 THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

human nature, we find strange correlations, odd 
fellowships of experience and sentiment. 

This fresh rejection of the notions of sacrifice, 
of holiness, of mystery, of sacraments, of a divine 
presence, of the spiritual uses of pain, is a recur- 
rence of the familiar attempt to put human life 
on one plane, to reduce it to one scale of values, 
to render it intelligible, subject to demonstration, 
to a final philosophy. It is the working of the 
positive mind, which is impatient of the sceptical 
and the undecided, and, out of desire to have 
things settled, inclines to any law rather than to 
anarchy, to any order rather than chaos, to any 
scheme of reason rather than to superstition. It 
proceeds from a bent for action; it must be up 
and doing, it must have a course, it must hoist 
sail and away, with chart, compass, and pole- 
star. But the sea-captain, however great his 
experience, however wide his knowledge, is 
obliged to stay upon the watery floor between the 
sea beneath and the air above. He is out of his 
element when he transfers his reckonings to reli- 
gion. There are so many sides to life, so many 
sorts of experience, so many kinds of character, 
disposition, and temperament, so many different 
conceptions of what constitutes happiness and the 
value of life, that one might well leave the slow 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 65 

adjusting mind to continue to piece and patch 
the old constitution of his beUef, changing it here 
and there, mending and tinkering, but preserving 
the main fabric which for centuries has procured 
him peace or victory and honor. Old conditions, 
the easy, rambling, comfortable habitation of the 
human heart, overgrown with memories and 
affections, if pulled down to make way for a 
modern structure, would leave desolation and 
barrenness. The lares and penates would not 
come to the new hearth. 

IV 

This discord between the old religion and the 
new is really, in one aspect at least, a reappearance 
of the contention over fact and poetry. To some 
men poetry is idle, deceitful, tending to senti- 
mental mooning, a hinderance to doing, a barrier 
to achievement, and beneficent only in its sterner 
aspects, as filHng the soul with Miltonic images 
and a high disdain ; to other men poetry — the 
poetry of childhood, of romance, of daring and 
deHcacy, of far-oflF scenes and idolized images, of 
unattainable visions and momentary dreams, of 
lights and shadows that never were on land or sea, 
of hopeless causes and impossible beliefs — seems 
the best justification of life ; and the old religion 



(i(i THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

is poetry. And poetry is a word of far-reaching 
meaning. The poet is a man upon whom the 
throbs of human experience beat with a clearer 
and more melodious resonance than upon other 
men. His imagination, led by a happy craving 
for harmony between these resonant experiences, 
selects and arranges, creating a melody ; then, pro- 
ceeding from melody to melody, he constructs a 
synthesis of sweet, concordant strains, and to 
these, as the echoes swell through his brain, an 
ideal significance attaches. The flush of color 
when dawn kisses the earliest clouds, the wave of 
sound when the breeze stirs the ripples and bends 
the rushes, the sensation of touch when hand 
meets hand, do not and cannot of themselves 
satisfy the yearnings they awaken ; echoes, circling 
and rising, proceed onward and upward — till 
the memory of each, almost divorced from its 
origin, becomes to the exultant imagination a 
message from the infinite. 

This ideal metempsychosis comes over all the 
great experiences of life; ideas, thus begotten, 
Hke some divine pollen, leaven as they permeate, 
and give a new aspect to common joys and pains, 
to right and wrong, to love and duty. Emotion, 
skilful musician, touches notes which in them- 
selves are idle, until the hearer is banished from 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 67 

the world of bald experience into an ideal world of 
transcendent values. This ideal world becomes 
more important, more real than the phenomena of 
daily experience, lightly undergone and lightly 
forgotten. It is the dreamer's dominant habita- 
tion, it becomes his home; and by it he explains 
the trivial sequences of physical sensations. 
Because in this ideal universe there is a God, 
because there is an immortal life, because right is 
right forever, and wrong, wrong, therefore human 
life, the relations of man to man, the satisfactions 
and discomforts of conscience, the success or 
failure of the soul, are matters of mighty conse- 
quence. 

This ideal world is the world of religion. This 
is what the poetic needs of mankind have done 
with facts and imaginings picked up almost at 
random. Christianity, for instance, seized on 
many harsh and grating notes, as well as on sweet 
sounds, — the legends of Chaldaean shepherds, the 
traditions of wandering sheiks, the chronicles of 
barbarous chieftains, the rites of fanatical priests, 
the prophecies of unpoised minds, as well as on 
the story of a beautiful and holy life, rendered more 
beautiful and holy by its remoteness from Euro- 
pean experience, and on many another note, in 
itself odd and seemingly unfit for religious use; 



68 THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 

and out of them it has created a religion, which, 
with all its defects, is permeated with poetry. 
The figure of Christ, the image of Mary, the 
stories of the Apostolic age, the Gregorian chants, 
the Gothic cathedrals, the Divine Comedy, the 
vesper bells, are all parts of this irrational poetry. 
And the defects are for the greater part due to the 
practical minds who desire to bring these strange, 
incongruous elements into a rational union, — 
rational according to an unpoetic interpretation 
of the experiences of life. And if one says that 
Christianity is permeated with poetry rather than 
with truth, it is because truth is of two kinds : 
scientific truth, which is the accumulated experi- 
ence of the senses, ranged and sorted according 
to reason ; and poetic truth, which is the sorting 
and arrangement of recorded images (exalted and 
illumined by an emotional hunger as they dwell 
in the memory), in accordance with the poetic 
needs of mankind. One satisfies the mind, the 
other satisfies the soul. And as the soul is vague, 
elusive, uncertain, tremulous, and passionate, it 
has never yet, at least with the masses of men, 
accepted the conclusions of reason. Its values 
do not coincide with the values of reason. Its 
satisfactions do not tally with the satisfactions of 
reason. Therefore rationalism and religion do 



THE RELIGION OF THE PAST 69 

not agree. Religion can take strange symbols, 
strange doctrines, strange dogmas, at which the 
scientific mind stares with amazement — sin, 
redemption, an incarnate God, a Trinity, a heaven, 
and a hell; because for religion these things do 
not rank as rational facts : they are symbolic 
causes, the least unsatisfactory explanation for the 
emotions and imaginings of the soul; they are 
the least unsympathetic evasions of the question, 
Why am I? 

One may criticise Christianity, one may find 
it irrational or transcending human experience 
in almost every detail, one may be repelled by its 
superstitions, dull to its poetry ; but, on the other 
hand, one cannot be rational and create a new 
religion. Religion is an emotional assumption 
to explain the world of reason. Poor humanity, 
it cannot have all that it would like. In our pres- 
ent stage of knowledge, at least, an adequate 
expression of emotional life can only be through 
poetry and religion. Poetry and music, love 
and hope, life and death, these persuade men that 
religion, however formulated in superstition and 
irrational dogma, is near to Truth. 

State contenti, umana gente, al quia: 
che, se potuto aveste veder tutto, 
mestier non era partorir Maria. 



CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE 



There is something almost unfilial in the stolid 
indifference with which we pass by old Christian 
dogmas. Earnest generations thought, prayed, 
yearned, over their interpretation of the meaning 
of life, and fashioned dogmas which they believed 
would light the steps of their children and their 
children's children to endless generations, yet we 
scarce look to see what these dogmas may mean. 
Creeds of a thousand years are no more heeded 
than old letters garnered in the garret; yet it 
may happen that among those old yellowing 
sheets, franked and sealed, are love-letters which, 
however dull and childish they may seem to the 
fancy-free, rekindle old fires in the hearts of those 
who have loved and lost, or loved in vain. 

The dogma-makers lived on our earth, they had 
faculties like ours, they loved and suffered, they 
were amazed and confounded ; they, too, tried to 
discover a formula that should prove the key to the 
mystery of life. The same mystery that con- 
fronted them confronts us still. To some men 

.70 



CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE ^\ 

those old dogmas brought peace, self-mastery, 
power ; why may we not linger a little to examine 
them ? 

We are not free to use dogmas that postulate 
facts inconsistent with the discoveries of science ; 
but science and religion have different duties. 
Science seeks a formula that shall square with 
human experience and satisfy the reason ; religion 
seeks a formula that shall minister to what in our 
ignorance we call the soul's needs and quicken the 
emotions. May we not find in the old dogmas 
something not forbidden by science that may still 
minister to the souFs needs ? 

The Christian creed says, Credo in Spiritum 
Sanctum. Is there nothing in human experience 
to justify this dogma ^ At one time in the 
Middle Ages there was a sect of men who came 
under the potent influence of this aspect of the 
Godhead. They believed that to each Person of 
the Trinity was allotted his period of divine 
dominion. God the Father had had his reign, 
God the Son was still reigning. Both reigns had 
had their special characters, but neither had been 
wholly adequate to the soul's needs, therefore there 
was ground for hope that the Holy Ghost would 
soon begin to reign, and that the season of children, 
of lilies, of good men triumphant, was at hand. 



72 CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE 

Were not Abate Gioacchino del Fiore and his 
disciples right, in thinking that the hope of good 
tidings for the soul lay in worship of the Holy 
Spirit ? The conception of God the Creator has 
its difficulties. The Beginning is the deep, 
permanent mystery ; and the creation of a world 
in which pain and suffering mark every individual 
life, renders the claims of a Creator to man's 
gratitude very questionable. Also the idea that 
Jesus of Nazareth is God is very difficult. But 
when we turn toward the third Person, to that 
aspect of Deity which has never yielded to man's 
anthropomorphic needs, which at best has been 
represented by a dove, a bringer of peace, do we 
not discern more light .? 

II 

We look through the telescope at night and see 
thousands upon thousands of suns, glorious in the 
surrounding dark. Their majesty inspires us with 
mingled feelings : fear before the vast unknown, 
reverence before the very great, exaltation at 
being a part of this mighty whole. But what, in 
the end, do we take away except bewilderment } 
There is no peace in the empyrean ; there is 
turmoil, effort, energy. Do we perceive there the 
presence of God the Father or God the Son } 



CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE 73 

Yet if there is a Divine Spirit, how fit a 
working-place is this majestic universe for its 

incessant toil. . . 

We look through the microscope; physicists, 
chemists, biologists, pry into the inner recesses of 
matter, only to find energy - everywhere, in the 
egg, in spermatozoa, in the minutest particles ot 
matter, animal, vegetable, or inorgamc, - restless 
energy, eternal effort. If we turn to the history 
of past life upon our globe, what do we find but 
records of energy, whether physical, chemical, or 
of that seemingly peculiar form which marks 
living organisms, everywhere energy leaving its 
trace in innumerable forms. In this history of life, 
according to our human standards, there has been 
a long procession, in which the principle of organic 
life, from the earliest period of vegetable existence, 
has advanced through manifold forms, upward, 
upward, in the depths of the sea, in the air, on 
land, by devious routes and strange passages, 
up, up, to the fish, to the bird, to four-footed 
beasts, and finally to man. Gradually, steadily, 
those mysterious forces which determine the 
nature of things, have been shaping gases and 
solids, crystals, drops of water, the pistil and 
stamens of the plant, the heart, lungs, eye, hand, 
and brain of man. In all organic life there are 



74 CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE 

cells in restless energy; cells piled on cells, cells 
in many kinds of combinations, all taking shape 
according to the will of some strenuous, persistent, 
experimenting force. The cells of the clover 
arrange themselves to fashion the flower which 
shall secrete honey, the cells of the bee to create an 
insect which shall gather it, the cells of the man to 
form a creature with an appetite for that honey and 
also with a yearning to find something divine in 
the universe. Everywhere that man can peer he 
finds energy intent upon changing all that is into 
new forms. This process, different as it looks in 
the very large and in the very small, in distant 
stars, in the tides of ocean, in the flora, in sea 
creatures or in mammals, seems to be one and the 
same, proceeding through myriad forms of activity, 
always seeking to effect a change. 

If this seeming is true, if all our world, all our 
universe, is the workroom, or playground it may 
be, for the same energy, may we not judge it, 
must we not judge it, by the only part of the pat- 
tern that is open to our judgment, by human life 
within our experience } How can corporeal 
creatures like ourselves, busily at work turning 
food into living tissue, entertain but the most 
remote understanding of elementary gases ^ 
What do we know of the ambitions, the enthusi- 



CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE 75 

asms, the discouragement, of coral insects ? All 
things that are, seem to be made of the same ele- 
ments which, by their physico-chemical energy 
after infinite experiments, have given to the 
human brain consciousness ; but we, who are the 
products of happier combinations, cannot under- 
stand these same potential energies compounded 
in lower forms. We must judge the whole process 
by ourselves, by man. This is the inner meaning 
of the saying, Know thyself. If we know our- 
selves, we shall know all. 

If, then, this universal process, when we see It 
at work in the only matters intelligible to us, in 
ourselves, seems to be an effort to rise, to attain 
the better, to bring the nobler to birth, — seems 
to be a struggle to renounce the lower and mount 
to a higher plane, — must we not suppose that the 
laborious energies at work throughout the universe 
are striving to do the same ? Let us look at bits 
of the pattern that we may perceive what is the 
design. Take a mother whose life is in her son's 
life, whose thoughts are all of him, whose hopes 
are his, who dotes upon his happiness; bid her 
choose for him between a higher life linked with 
pain and sorrow, and a lower life loaded with 
pleasures and worldly success, and will she hesi- 
tate ? The upward energy that works through 



'■j^ CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE 

all her being will not let her choose a lower plane 
for her son. 

Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, 
ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza. 

Take the son of such a mother at a time when, 
young blood flowing through his veins, he has 
fallen in love. The law of all organic nature is. 
Be fruitful and multiply. The tree bears fruit, 
the vines bring forth grapes, the herring spawns, 
the lioness bears her cubs ; all creatures obey the 
great command, all hand on the miraculous torch 
of Hfe. But the young lover sees deeper into the 
heart of things : 

I struggle towards the light ; and ye 
Once long'd-for storms of love ! 

If with the light ye cannot be, 
I bear that ye remove. 

He hears the pulsing reverberations of the animal 
command ; and he hears also commands less 
audible, yet to his soul still more imperious. 
He must consecrate himself to the highest, he must^ 
even if he is compelled to turn his back on all the 
happiness that looks so fair before him, the sweet 
blue eyes, "the soft, enkerchiePd hair." Here, 
in the mother's heart, in the young man's heart, 
where life beats at its fastest, the need of breaking 



CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE "^ 

free from the lower is most peremptory. Such is 
the pattern wrought by this energy as it appears 
in human Hfe. Biologists call this force blind, 
but to the ignorant it seems to see its path " as 
birds their trackless way." 

Ill 

What can we infer of this universal energy but 
that it is working to change what is into something 
higher ? All this turmoil, this commotion of earth 
and heavens, is a discontent, and a struggle. May 
we not here see, in this endeavor to supplant the 
lower by the higher, a Holy Spirit at work t 

What the source or origin of the universe may 
be lies beyond human guessing; but there seems 
to be an imprisoned power struggling to detach 
itself from base integuments, striving to dominate 
some hindering medium, aspiring to make the 
universe anew. Matter, or whatever we call the 
substance of the phenomena on which our con- 
sciousness has dawned, however far from any 
apparent sympathy with man, however muddy 
its vesture, however hideous its aspect, is under 
the control of some energy, which displays itself 
in heat, light, motion, thought, and love. Even 
if the proper dogmatic adjective for this energy 
is -physico-chemical^ rnay not the adjective divine 



78 CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE 

be appropriate also ? What limit can human 
foresight assign to its achievements ? And as we 
watch this energy at work in what seems to us our 
best and noblest, may we not infer that love is 
the medium in which this upward impulse finds 
the least impediment, the least hinderance to its 
free motions ; or, differently put, that love is the 
highest expression of the universal force which, 
everywhere and without ceasing, is striving to 
create a universe of a higher order ? 

It sounds arrogant and foolish for man to make 
himself the measure of the universe, to assert 
that his thoughts and acts are the fruit and crown 
of things ; but he has no choice. He seeks every- 
where, and finds nothing that he can call higher 
or nobler than the expression of this energy in good 
men. And there can be no more solemn or ad- 
monishing sanction for high endeavor than the 
knowledge that we are the standard-bearers of the 
divine spirit. It is ennobling to think that if we 
advance our standards, the divine advances; if 
we fall back, by so much the divine loses in the 
battle; that the divine energy manifesting itself 
in us is one with the energy that whirls the stolid 
worlds. 

Is not this the Holy Spirit that Abate Gioac- 
chino dimly apprehended ? Is not this the force 



CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE 79 

that dawned, as in a dream, upon the conscious- 
ness of those mystics who have felt a conviction 
that they were face to face with God ? By some 
favoring juncture of circumstances these holy 
men suddenly became sensitive to the meaning of 
the cosmic process, and their souls cried out, Lo, 
God is here ! Is not that which we call prayer 
the unconscious bending of ourselves to act in 
concord with this universal energy, as heliotropic 
plants turn to the light ? This potential element 
in the stuff that composes our universe has been 
able to evolve a lover's abnegation, a mother's 
devotion, it has created the imagination of a 
Shakspere, it moves to music, and clothes itself 
in light; surely it is divine. Would it be higher 
or holier if we could hear the rush of Cherubim or 
see the gleam upon a Seraph's wings ? 

Man cannot hope, within his narrow compass of 
sense, to feel the fulness of the divine spirit. 
He cannot open his soul wide enough to compre- 
hend what this universal endeavor is, seemingly 
infinite in extent, infinite in patience, infinite in 
perseverance. But if of the divine we demand 
heroism in the face of danger, has there not been, 
even in the contracted limits of human history, 
heroism sufficient ^ If of the divine we demand 
suffering, we have but to let our thoughts rest 



8o CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE 

for an instant upon the long ages of animal life 
upon this globe, one long track of blood, in order 
to shudder at the cruelty endured. 

Is not this struggle of the higher against the 
lower, whether under the waters of ocean, in pre- 
glacial jungles, or in our own hearts, as wonderful 
and splendid as the conflict of Michael and the host 
of heaven against the rebellious angels ? Surely, 
yes. 

Suppose that man is the highest life in all the 
universe, suppose that his race and all animal life 
is doomed to destruction as our planet cools ofF, is 
it not better to have endeavored and suffered than 
never to have endeavored at all ? Possibly, some- 
where, a memory may live of how the human race 
rose from bestiality and lust to devotion to beauty, 
truth, and love. But even if no memory of man 
shall continue after he has perished, still, through- 
out the universe, the restless energy that animated 
him will continue undaunted, making its experi- 
ments, striving to change that which is into that 
which, according to our human judgment, shall 
be better. Is not this a Divine Spirit, whether It 
works through visible, tangible, ponderable things, 
or through spiritual essences ; whether it be an 
archangel or physico-chemical activity that has 
created the soul of man ^ 



CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE 8l 

Is not this the aspect of the Trinity that must, 
as the disciples of Joachim believed, outlive its 
other aspects, and do most to satisfy the yearning 
desire of man to find something holy in the uni- 
verse ? May we not all repeat : Credo in Spiritum 
Sanctum ? 



ON BEING ILL 

There are, according to the poet, "four seasons 
in the mind of man"; and each has its appro- 
priate mood, its range of vision, its philosophy. 
But, in addition to these four seasons, there are 
two other categories which shift a man's thoughts, 
the object of his vision and his philosophy, even 
more than the change from Spring to Summer 
or from Autumn to Winter. These other cate- 
gories are health and sickness. In these two 
states man beholds two very different worlds; 
so different are these worlds, that if a man should 
live in one only, he would know but half the 
human universe. 

Health is the normal state. In it the faculties 
are in equilibrium and fulfil their obvious duties. 
Upon it, as if it was a sure foundation, science 
builds hypotheses and dogmas, and men of 
action with a turn for literature construct what 
they call a sane and happy philosophy of life. 
Health is the condition of life's daily routine. 
Health accepts life as a matter of course, without 

82 



ON BEING ILL 83 

demur, without criticism, almost without appre- 
ciation. A healthy man is indifferent to all theo- 
ries about the universe ; one theory is as good as 
another. He himself is the centre of his universe ; 
and his senses, like so many radii, describe its 
uttermost bounds. 

Suppose the healthy man to be a farmer. 
Then the prime interests of his life will cluster 
around his barn, his cowshed and his vegetable 
garden. His affections embrace his potato 
hillocks, his purpling cabbages, and the corn- 
patch, where in July the stately stalks deck 
their heads with plumes and outdo in parallel 
symmetry the spears of Velasquez' conquering 
Spaniards at Breda. Here is his universe — 
house, barn, woodpile, chicken run, pump, or- 
chard and meadows — what to him are the 
outlying regions beyond the farm limits .? How 
is he concerned with fields and woodland across 
the county turnpike, with countries over seas, 
or with the ethereal distances that encompass 
our solar system ? Health has fixed the bourns 
of his intellectual kingdom. Its axis is in the 
stable, and all the cloud-capped hypotheses 
that science with infinite industry has built up 
concerning what lies between his boundary Hne 
and the farthest regions of infinite space, count 



84 ON BEING ILL 

for less than the humming of the teakettle or 
the cackle of the hens. All attempts by Science 
or Philosophy to shift the central point of his 
universe to some part of the Milky Way, or to 
the Absolute, must fail. And yet it is upon the 
healthy man, upon the reports of his senses, 
upon the processes of his reason, that science 
builds its truths, and philosophy its hypotheses. 
The business of a healthy man is to live his 
life; and in order to live it well, he must make 
himself, so far as he can, a creature of instinct, 
if possible an automaton. He adores the god 
of action, because health is, in its manifestations, 
a mere bundle of activities. Love of action is 
the patriotism of health. This attitude toward 
life gives a comfortable sense of snugness, of 
familiarity, of home, and protects such as adopt 
it against the vast outer universe that serves, it 
seems, but to confuse and dismay them. It 
holds a man's attention fast to the region where 
he fills his belly, chooses his wife, digs, hoes, 
drives his cows afield and calls them back to the 
milking. This attitude is natural, human; it 
proclaims man's origin. But in the opinion of 
those who care for unrestricted liberty of specula- 
tion and imagining, it deprives the human mind 
of its noblest birthright. For them it is high 



ON BEING ILL 85 

treason to what should be man's governing 
principle. Nevertheless, action remains the basis 
of life; and, as even the most sceptical critic 
must admit, action renders a service that might 
well seem to compensate for all the limitations 
which it imposes upon the human spirit. Action 
makes a theatre out of life. 

If we were to weigh with even hand one by one 
the good and evil things that fate lays in the 
balances, in order to determine whether human 
life be worth the living, perhaps none of the 
things deemed good — not the luxuriant vitality 
of youth, not affection, nor romantic love, not 
interest in work, nor the approbation of our 
fellows — would weigh as heavily as the pleasure 
got from the theatre of life. The drama of life 
is unintermittent, boundless in resource; of 
Infinite variety, it appeals to every taste. It 
reckons up its actors by the million. It dresses 
up in royal robes, with crowns, sceptres, and all 
the wardrobe of imperial millinery, kings and 
emperors, moves them about, and causes them 
to utter majestic harangues, and pirouette over 
the stage in a manner to rivet our amazed at- 
tention. It takes bandits, pirates, cossacks, 
and parades them to and fro to a wild music. 
And these are but supernumeraries who fill in 



86 ON BEING ILL 

the background and the wings of the stage. A 
little in front of them come players, whose names 
are printed on the programme, enumerated as 
statesmen, philosophers, poets, musicians, ex- 
plorers, and so on. Finally, in front of them all, 
come the protagonists in Everyman's drama — 
the household headed by the cook, the milkman, 
and the butcher's boy, the immediate neighbors 
(each separate group playing its own comedy 
within the great comedy), husband and wife, 
nursery maid and babies, schoolboys and tutors, 
guests, cousins, callers, and all the multitude who 
fill the minor roles, the chauffeur, the trolley-car 
conductor, the old lady who in times of illness 
comes to advise mental healing, the elderly clerk, 
the lazy office-boy, the fashionable tailor, the 
cobbler round the corner, the habitue at the 
club, the fruit-vender, the policeman, the parson's 
assistant, the political reformer. The theatre of 
Hfe with its tragedy, comedy, farce, its gruesome 
scenes and its delightful episodes, has but one 
patent fault; it has no plot and no apparent 
meaning. Healthy men, the rich, the pious, 
praise both plot and meaning; but the indiffer- 
ent spectator can distinguish neither, nothing 
but eternal motion. A rational explanation of 
action is that in providing the theatre of life it 



ON BEING ILL 87 

furnishes the justification of life. All living 
things are actors who keep on going in order that 
scene shall follow scene without intermission ; 
for this men preserve their own lives, for this 
they rear children, future actors, who shall take the 
places of those whose parts are ended. "All the 
world's a stage, and all the men and women merely 
players," but men and women are also specta- 
tors. All are admitted to the show; some sit 
in the orchestra stalls, some in the upper gallery. 
At one and the same time all men are both players 
and spectators ; they may be mute supernumera- 
ries in the noisier parts of the drama, but all are 
protagonists of some particular episode. All this 
we owe to action, and action is the product of health. 
Action, then, keeps life alive and furnishes a 
nonpareil theatre. To the eyes of the healthy 
man this theatre is delightful and Hfe an invalu- 
able possession. This is the mood of health. 

II 

Once a man is ill, the scene changes. All that 
great stretch of universe that formerly reached 
out, in dusky dimness, from beyond the farm 
road toward infinity, has sunk below the horizon, 
it has becorne as if it had never been. The field 
of corn, the potato patch, the flower garden. 



88 ON BEING ILL 

the gravelled walk, the porch, have also become 
part of uncharted darkness, merged into chaos; 
even hall, stairway, the whole house outside the 
sickroom door, is now beyond the further edge 
of twilight consciousness. The sick man's 
physical universe has shrunk to a bedroom, it 
is circumscribed by four narrow walls, but it 
serves all the purposes of the mightiest universe, 
it fills his thoughts, and presents those marks of 
order and intelligibility that distinguish the 
tract within the intellectual reach of the human 
mind from whatever may lie beyond. It has 
advantages over any larger universe in that the 
smaller it is, the more intelligible, the more home- 
like it becomes, and in that it stands more clearly 
in definite relations to the sick man's inner self. 

The central point of interest is his bed. The 
white coverlet lies like new-fallen snow. Under 
it his legs, two long projections with which he 
appears to have little or nothing to do, stretch 
away down towards the foot of the bed, like 
mountain ranges on a map of physical geography ; 
while the light covering falls away in gentle 
slopes on either side. Then the brass bedpost 
catches his eye. It draws to itself more than 
its share of light, and, as if the words Fiat Lux 
had been spoken directly to it, radiates brazenly. 



ON BEING ILL 89 

But an object near by, on the table at the foot 
of the bed, is far more interesting. A long green 
stalk rises from a yellow vase, and stands very 
tall and straight in its pride at carrying the 
perfect flower that, with its snowy petals half 
disclosed, half folded as if to hold their fragrance 
in, crowns the green stem. This white rose is a 
triumphant issue of the efforts of Nature, of 
her experiments in valley and meadow, m sun- 
shine and in shade, the achievement of the noble 
collaboration of root and stalk, of leaves and 

blossoms. 

If Nature had aimed to produce color only, or 
fragrance only, it would be seemingly intelligible 
that man should chance to be pleased by the 
color or by the fragrance; but according to 
what doctrine of chances should a man be charmed 
not only by the color and the fragrance, but 
also by the exquisite texture of the petals that 
fits them for no rougher office than to line a 
fairy's cradle? Each petal opens at the touch 
of light, and then, as if the caress of the full 
sunlight were too poignant, covers itself with 
shadows and half-tones. 

In a state of health one accepts a rose as part 
of the great adventure, not less wonderful, nor 
more, than all the other elements that go to 



90 ON BEING ILL 

make up that adventure. But the mind, half 
set free from the emaciated body, cannot take 
the rose merely so. Why is it that Milton 
plants roses thick in his Garden of Eden; why 
does Dante make the saints and angels of God 
but petals in the vast rose of the heaven of 
heavens ? Why is there never a lover that does 
not compare his mistress to a rose .? Can it be 
by chance that the rose and the soul of man 
are matched so melodiously } And as the rose 
has travelled along its vegetable path, trusting 
to the wind or to the honey bee for transporta- 
tion to a kindlier soil, is it chance that has con- 
ferred upon her this combination of color, 
fragrance and texture, and brought her as it 
were to a trysting place with the soul of man, 
who, on his part, having traced his way through 
millions of years down a dark path, has attained 
the senses that are ravished by that union of 
color, fragrance, and texture ? What service has 
the rose rendered to our ancestors that we should 
admire it beyond all rational measure .? Did it 
feed them, clothe them, warm them, or serve to 
deck some otherwise unattractive maid and win 
for her a wooer .? Did our ancestors, whether 
beasts or human progenitors of retreating skull 
and tusklike teeth, breathe in its beauty and 



ON BEING ILL 9I 

take fresh courage for the battle of life ? Can 
it be by chance that man has come to find in a 
flower the great symbol of Beauty ? Why is 
not the fruit more beautiful to him than the 
flower ? Why not the vegetable than the fruit ? 
Why not the fish than the vegetable, or a lamb 
chop most beautiful of all ? The rose does not 
help the human being, even to-day, in the struggle 
for life; rather she is a hinderance. She stands 
there in the vase, and as the sick man's delighted 
eye follows the contour of leaf and petal, and 
dwells upon the dainty setting of the corolla in 
the calyx (as if the soul of a bird had alighted 
on the soul of a nest), she asserts: "To gaze 
on Beauty is the nobleness of life." Is this 
chance? Or is there some element in the spirit 
of man that renders him as he proceeds upon his 
upward journey more sensitive to beauty, and, 
as time goes on, will cause him to perceive beauty 
lying thick about him, in flower, leaf, pebble, 
waterdrop, in every clod of common earth, and 
so at last establish harmonious relations between 
him and all that is ? Is this the end to which 
Life consciously aspires, the argument to justify 
creation and existence ? 

To the spirit, still uncertain of long sojourn in 
its fleshly dress, the beauty of the rose is a tor- 



92 ON BEING ILL 

meriting riddle. The spirit keeps asking : "Why, 
why am I imprisoned in this compound of dust, 
condemned to suffer when this insensible machine 
goes wrong ? What whimsical power commanded 
me, a spirit, to be conscious of physical malad- 
justment?" And the rose keeps answering: 
"You are also conscious of me." 

Is knowledge of the rose a piece of mystical 
experience, a communion with a symbol of pure 
beauty, a partial and momentary loss of self in 
the consciousness of that which is Life's explana- 
tion .? The mystics, bound by the words and 
phrases of human experience, use images of 
light, of sound, of sweetness ; but in all they 
say, they merely try to express what the rose 
is to the sick man. Is every sick man a mystic ? 
Does illness dilapidate the blocks of physical 
dogma out of which is built the edifice of daily 
life .? Does it dissolve the mortar of the matter- 
of-fact, dispel the illusions of habitual action, 
and leave the soul face to face with symbols of 
something toward which all life aspires ? 

Ill 

A little beyond the foot of the bed come the 
fireplace and mantlepiece. The small dimensions 
of the room leave but a narrow passage for a 



ON BEING ILL 93 

white-capped, white-aproned, ministrant, who 
walks to and fro with noiseless steps, and, when 
the clock strikes the hour, brings a spoonful of 
some medicinal potion which custom, or fashion, 
or hope, foists upon the sick. The wood fire 
preaches mortality, as it resolves into their ele- 
ments the logs of oak, chestnut, and birch which 
cost nature so much pains to endow with life. 
But another symbol withdraws the wandering 
eye from the fire. On the mantlepiece, leaning 
against the wall, there is a rude picture, painted 
on copper in archaic, Flemish style. The subject 
is the crucifixion. At the foot of the cross Mary 
stands erect, John with bowed head close by, 
and hovering in the air little truncated cherubs 
catch in golden chalices the drops of blood that 
fall from the dead Christ's wounds. At first 
one jumps to the conclusion that this scene, 
acknowledged throughout Christendom as the su- 
preme human tragedy, has been always misunder- 
stood. The minds of men have been preoccupied 
by the ecclesiastical interpretation, which regards 
the Crucified Christ as the centre of the tragedy, 
and puts at the climax of its Htany, "By Thy 
cross and passion." The spectacle of physical 
suffering, especially to men in health, wrings 
the corporeal sensibility, and in the case of finely 



94 ON BEING ILL 

tuned natures even imprints imitative marks in 
hands, and feet and side; and yet a far deeper 
suffering was endured at the foot of the cross. 
Mary is the centre of the tragedy : 

Stabat mater dolorosa 
juxta crucem lacrimosa, 

dum pendebat filius. 
Cujus animam gementem 
contristantem et dolentem 

pertransivit gladius. 

The poet knew that the mother was the greater 
sufferer, for a sword had also pierced his soul. 
She, who had stored up in her heart all the words 
of her little boy, all the sayings of her eldest 
son, her beautiful youth, her divine leader of 
men, suffered more pain than nails or lance have 
power to inflict. Nevertheless Mary is not the 
centre of the tragedy. Christendom is right; 
instinctively it feels that the figure on the cross 
is the cynosure of human interest. 

The crucifixion is a tragedy, not because it 
represents human pain, even pain undeserved, 
but because the cross passionately asserts a 
truth at the heart of life. There, on the cross, 
hangs a body, worshipped by Christendom as 
the body of one who in himself incorporated 
both the human and the divine. This belief 



ON BEING ILL 95 

gives a superhuman poignancy to the crucifixion. 
The beHef in this union of man and God in Christ 
crucified is true, not because God came down 
from his celestial throne to earth, but because 
man is the highest exponent of the mysterious 
force that pulses through the universe, the clear- 
est evidence of divinity. Why should we care 
whether the divine is human, when there is such 
abundant witness that the human is divine, in 
all that we demand of the divine .? In heroism, 
in self-sacrifice, in the power of loving ? 

To the sick man the divine reveals itself in 
many a way, it fills his sickroom. He does not 
ask that angels shall minister to him, for woman's 
hands smooth his pillow, bring him a marvellous 
beverage, called milk, and a delicate, transparent, 
glittering mass of bubbles that dance in rainbow 
colors within the tumbler; this ambrosia the 
prosaic nurse calls whipped up white of egg, as 
if by mere words she could exorcise the spirit 
of poetry. Poetry invades the sickroom, it 
sings in the sunbeams, it leaps with the leaping 
flames of the fire, and snuggles in the bosom of 
the rose. Poetry is but the harbinger of the 
divine, and both express themselves in the human 
voice. If the forces of life can take the dust of 
the earth and compound it into a woman's hands. 



96 ON BEING ILL 

and that miracle does not convince us that the 
forces of life are divine, then no other miracles 
or revelations will. 

The divine manifests itself in beauty, in poetry, 
in light, in the rose, in human affections. But in 
order to manifest itself the divine must first 
exist; and the crucifixion testifies that that 
which is potentially divine can only become 
divine through pain. This is the teaching of 
the crucifixion, and this is more readily set forth 
for the multitude by obvious symbols of nails 
and spear thrust, than in the mother's woe. 
The crucifixion is the supreme allegory of the 
triumph of the divine through pain, the symbol 
that divinity is the child of pain, and only by 
the ministration of pain comes to birth. 

It may be that pain is a process of purification, 
of rarefaction of the spirit, and so enables the 
spirit's more ethereal part to rise, leaving behind 
that which clogs and impedes its flight. This 
doctrine has long been held with respect to man, 

— patiendo fit homo melior, — and, inasmuch as 
man is but an integral part of all the universe, 
how can a law be true for him if it be not also 
true for all the universe ? All the nervous system 

— if the answer is to be looked for in the colloca- 
tion of cells — has come into being in order to 



ON BEING ILL 97 

increase life, to enlarge it, to render it more sen- 
sitive. Why, if the vibrations that cause con- 
sciousness of sound, sight, touch, smell, warmth, 
and the rest, are creating mind, or enabling mind 
to possess a local habitation, and if pain hovers 
about these vibrations, as a mother hovers about 
her children, and if the sterner tempering of 
character is wrought by pain, what can we do 
but acknowledge that pain is mysteriously at 
work around, above, and below us, guiding, warn- 
ing, chastising, blessing, using the mind of man 
as material for its high purpose of creating the 
divine ? 

This is but the humdrum attempt of the well 
man to express in words the thoughts that haunted 
him when sick. While he lay in bed, he did not 
need the intervention of words. To the sick 
man words are gross, palpable things, they come 
with footfall heavier than that of the choreman 
who fetches wood for the fire; and each word, 
like a traveller from regions of ice and snow, is 
wrapped in all sorts of outer garments that 
conceal the thought within. They disturb the 
quiet of the room ; they distort and caricature 
the fine Ariels of thought that hover just outside 
the portals of comprehension, and would come 
in, were words delicate enough not to travesty 

H 



98 ON BEING ILL 

them. Thoughts crowd about, eager to explain, 
longing to tell the sick man why it is that pain 
is his benefactor, and when they pass through 
the gates of comprehension, and are stuffed into 
words, they are no longer Ariels, but mummers 
that gesticulate, make faces, and mock the 
listener. This is the vexation the sick man 
endures; he feels that he has been lifted to 
purer regions, closer to the meaning that for him, 
at least, lies hidden behind symbols, — behind 
the crucifix, the rose, a woman's hand, behind 
light, behind love, — and yet he can never 
remember, after he has returned to earth, just 
what he really experienced and believed. 

But if he turns his attention from that which 
he vainly hopes to find in the wallet of his memory 
— you cannot fetch home light in a bag — to 
what is really there, he finds religion. Then, at 
last, he realizes what sickness is doing for him. 
The healthy man has no time for religion ; he 
is concerned with action. He must plough his 
field, sow his corn, hoe his potatoes, and trail 
the honeysuckle over the trellis. His mind is 
busy with manifold occupations, hopes, and anx- 
ieties. The theatre of life, filling the stage of 
his universe, takes what leisure he may have. 
Or, if he has a religion, it is either an inheritance, 



ON BEING ILL 99 

like his grandfather*s clothes fitted for a man of 
different stature, or one which he has constructed 
out of fears of the evil that may befall, or out of 
gratitude for evil escaped. The sick man is in 
quite a different case. His stage is shrunk to 
his bedroom ; his drama observes the unities. 
But for the dumb presence of the nurse, he is 
alone, alone with the white rose, with the picture 
of the crucifixion, with his body and the hovering 
spirits of life and death. His drama has become 
as simple as that of ^schylus, and he drifts off 
into the religious mood, a mood of humble cu- 
riosity concerning life, and of quest for a loyalty 
which shall assert his need of holiness to be 
proof that his soul has received an imprint, no 
matter how faint, from the presence of something 
holy. 

The first feeling is of curiosity. What is this 
life that floats, like the Ark, upon a waste of 
inanimate turbulence ? Everywhere motion, 
everywhere restlessness. Is it only in this chance 
combination of cells, the brain, that conscious- 
ness can make her dwelling-place ? And does 
my consciousness merely reflect for a time the mul- 
titudinous outside world, like the surface of a 
pool, and then, as when the water sinks away 
into the sands beneath, reflect no more ? Is it 



lOO ON BEING ILL 

all mere chance — the white rose, the crucifixion, 
the Son nailed to the cross, the mother in agony 
upon the ground beneath ? Were these things 
caused by chance, or are there forces that have 
a purpose and tend towards an end, in whose 
obedience a man may range himself, and spend 
himself in an effort to achieve ? Is there a soul of 
the universe with which his soul can confederate ? 

IV 

How shall a man go about to find the soul of 
the universe ? What shibboleth, what badge, 
shall he look for ? What do we mean by holi- 
ness ? Is it a mere series of resignations, the 
bidding farewell one after another to the impulses 
of Hfe, to the desires of the body and the mind ? 
is it the shaking off as much as may be of all 
corporeal control ? Or, is it an abstraction de- 
duced from the higher pleasures of life, from 
heroism, from the exultations of sacrifice, from 
the joy of pure thought ? Or do our souls come 
into touch, as our earth's atmosphere touches 
the ethereal space beyond, with an oversoul, and 
become hallowed by that communion ? Or, is 
the upward flight of the soul of necessity in and 
through a region that, by its mere remoteness 
from the friction of life, inspires the human 



ON BEING ILL lOI 

spirit with a calm, a cool, a peace, and an exal- 
tation ? 

Cut off from all action, floating down a stream 
of incoherent thoughts, the sick man comes to 
feel that he has had an experience of holiness, 
like a pilgrim who has visited some far off sanctu- 
ary. His sick room has become a shrine. Here 
he has been alone, face to face, with the one 
question that to him is real — all other questions, 
all other aspects of things, all perplexities, having 
been swallowed up in the night of chaos beyond 
the limits of his sickroom universe. 

Illness is one of the great privileges of life. 
It denies the common value of things, and whispers 
that man*s destiny is bound up with transcenden- 
tal powers. Illness pares and lops off the outer 
parts of Hfe and leaves us with the essence of it. 
That essence gropes blindly for its fundamental 
relationships. Is this consciousness of mine, — 
which becomes, when shrunk to its inmost being, 
a mere spiritual hunger for union with something 
other than itself, an isolated drop of what was 
once an ocean of being ? Does it imply that a 
universal soul has disintegrated, that all its con- 
stituent elements have been broken up and 
scattered, each still impressed with the memory 
that they were once parts of a whole .? Or is 



I02 ON BEING ILL 

this hunger but a sign of a new awakening, the 
first movement towards a combination, a union, 
that shall be divine ? 

Is there a Creator ? Or, is the idea of a Creator 
the product of superstitious ignorance, which has 
subdued the human soul and too lightly applied 
the human analogy of man reshaping matter ? 
Who would willingly admit a Creator that had 
created this universe, with all its suffering, unless 
upon the supposition that He was so cramped 
by fate or dearth of material, that He could only 
create it of warring forces and dragons' teeth ? 
But who can conceive that mechanical forces, 
in the course of myriad encounters with one 
another, have by mere accident struck out the 
sparks of mind ? 

And why this eternal commotion ? Is all this 
turmoil the struggle of a baser element to attain 
self-realization, to achieve psychic life ? Is the 
whole universe seeking more life and fuller ? Or 
is life our original sin, and death the great purifier ? 
Is it beneficent death that is striving to cast out 
the vexing seeds of life, and restore a universal 
calm ? Is death the great ocean of peace to 
which all the rivers of existence flow ? Is the 
blotting out of the universe beyond the farm 
road, the reduction of it to a small sickroom. 



ON BEING ILL 103 

the diminution of the innumerable dramatis 
personcB to one white-capped, white-aproned 
nurse, a sample of the divine effort towards 
simplicity and peace ? Is consciousness the real 
ill ? Is this universal commotion harmless till 
consciousness arises ? Is life a privilege, a duty, 
or a sin ? Why should our ripples disturb the 
peace of God ? 

While these fancies come and go, there stands 
the picture of the crucifixion, there the white 
rose opens its petals wider hour by hour as if 
it would enfold the world in the arms of its 
fragrance. The one proclaims that there is a 
greater nobleness in pain than the inanimate is 
capable of, and the other asks: "What but a 
beneficent force could create a white rose or a 
child ?" How can one answer them ? These 
are witnesses that Hfe is nobler than death. The 
human heart does beat quicker at the sight of a 
will to suffer, it does rejoice at roses. If the 
propulsive rhythm of the universe has produced 
these as samples of its purposes, as intimations 
of its goal, does not the whole pattern of existence 
suddenly seem to burst out as if written in letters 
of light .? Right and wrong cease to be meaning- 
less terms ; a way opens to act in unison with the 
motions of the universe, to help, no matter in 



I04 ON BEING ILL 

how trivial a respect, its upward will to prevail ; 
the music of hope blows in the wind, sings in 
April showers, murmurs in the mysterious noises 
of the woods, in the voices of men, in the anguish 
of the crucifix, and calls upon life to feel, to en- 
joy, and to suffer, for the sake of more life. 

In this way the sick man's thoughts go to and 
fro. The drama of life has simplified itself into 
a mystery play. Life parleys with Death. Death 
urges peace : 

Ease after toil, port after stormy seas, 

Peace after war, death after life, doth greatly please. 

But in the soft, caressing insistence upon the 
pleasantness of peace, how can we tell whether 
the attraction that draws us on to lie stiller and 
stiller, is a summing up of all the arguments that 
belittle life and extol death, or a mere self-in- 
dulgence of the body, counselling ease ? Does 
this sweetly magical incantation, under which 
the limbs lie quiet and the hands involuntarily 
clasp themselves on the breast, come from the 
body or the mind ? And is remembrance of 
happy days, is the pleading of old maxims that 
condemn a physical surrender to death, is the 
desire to worship a god of the living, a mere 
psychical mechanism set in motion by the heart, 



ON BEING ILL 105 

beating rhythmically to the oscillations that run 
through the physical universe ? It is all a re- 
ligious mystery play. Life is religious, Death is 
religious. The question, "Shall I live or shall 
I die," resolves itself into a question of loyalty. 
Is life or death our God .? 

V 

The return from illness to health is like coming 
up from a dive, supposing the time from when the 
swimmer first sees light through the water until 
his head rises to the surface to be the affair of 
weeks. The change in physical condition may 
be slow, but the change in orientation takes place 
in a twinkling and is complete. The eye no longer 
looks down into unplumbed deeps, but back to- 
ward the light of day; curiosity for the ultimate 
yields to a golden memory of familiar things, — 
friends, household goods, books, barking dogs, 
the freshness of grass and trees. The body has 
reasserted itself. The dreaming imagination is 
dragged away from its goal by the galloping 
senses. Eye, ear, touch, taste, start upon a 
rampage. Especially does the appetite for food 
wax furious, discovering itself endowed with 
power to transform a coddled egg into something 
rich and strange, and to illumine chicken broth 



I06 ON BEING ILL 

with a charm that no art can equal. The uni- 
verse, lately shrunk to the sickroom, now rises 
again, like the Genie out of the bottle in which 
he had been imprisoned ; the sickroom becomes 
a house of detention, and at its door, as in a sea- 
shell clapped to the ear, the convalescent hearkens 
to all the rumours of the outer world. 

It is the very completeness of the body's 
triumph that constitutes the weakness of its 
permanent victory. The exultation with which 
it mocks the dreamy imagination is too plainly 
the work of recovering nerves, of reinvigorated 
muscles, of hungry physical organs. It is a 
triumph of force, not of reason. Health is not 
magnanimous; it prosecutes its victory relent- 
lessly, as if it feared to leave a single dreamy 
thought unquenched. Its victory proves noth- 
ing except that we are living things. Perhaps 
the dead rejoice in death, as greatly as the living 
do in life. 

Convalescence, however, is a pleasant time. 

Away with Thomas-a-Kempis, Obermann, Amiel, 

away with anchorites and monks, bats that 

haunt the chill vaults of the antechamber 

of Death. 

Come, thou goddess fair and free. 
In heaven yclept Euphrosyne ! 



ON BEING ILL 107 

The sick man on his path back to Ufe has a vora- 
cious appetite for the humour, the gayety, the 
light follies of life. He bids the nurse take away 
the Bible and Paradise Lost, which during his 
dark days he had kept at his elbow; he asks for 
Punch, Pickwick, La Rotisserie de la Peine Pedau- 
que, Don Quixote. Mirth, even in its ruder 
livery, appears as the most desirable of human 
emotions. Falstaff comes habited in a magical 
radiance, as if jollity were humanity's noblest 
attribute. And, indeed, if the partisans of health 
are right, there is no very good reason for suppos- 
ing that it is not. 

The convalescent's ears crave the crowing of 
the cock, the cluck of hens, the grunt of pigs; 
even the expletives of the passing teamster sound 
with a rough music, chiming in with the universal 
chorus of the world's noises that sing a paean in 
praise of life. 

Life seizes upon every means of appeal withm 
its power to lure the sick man back from the 
worship of death. There is something almost 
comic in its solicitude lest it should lose one 
adorer. No coquette — not Beatrice nor Ce- 
limene — ever took such pains, adjusted ribbons, 
ringlets, ruffles, Hfted or dropped her eyes, turned 
a slim neck, or smiled or sighed, with a tithe of 



Io8 ON BEING ILL 

the flirtatlousness of life. Each man fancies 
himself an Antony, and the spirit of Life, a very 
Cleopatra, head over heels enamoured of him; 
he yields unconditionally to her bewitching lure. 

At last the nurse goes, the doctor takes his 
leave, the medicine bottles are put on the closet 
shelf, the patient is up and about, and then, 
thoroughly subdued to the humours of Life, — 
for Life is April when it woos, December when it 
weds — he is turned out of doors, back to the 
dull daily routine, back to hoeing, ploughing, 
weeding, back to haggling, buying and selling, 
back to the world of living men. Life, the Circe, 
who looked so fair, has bewitched him, metamor- 
phosed him from a spirit into an animal, put her 
collar on him and turned him loose, to run on all 
fours like other animals after the things that 
seem to him desirable. 

Even then, in moments of leisure, in twilight 
intervals between the work of day and the hours 
of sleep, or, when on a starry night he leans forth 
from his window, as St. Augustine and Monica 
leaned from the window of their inn at Ostia 
to brood over the text, "Enter thou into the joy 
of thy Lord," — in such moments he broods upon 
the thoughts that swept over him when sick, and 
he muses upon the strangeness of life and wonders 



ON BEING ILL 109 

whether he did not see more clearly with his 
heavy eyes, and apprehend more clearly with his 
fevered brow, when he lay upon the bed in his 
sickroom, than now when busy with the rough 
activities of life. 



VI 

THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

Prologue 

The traveller looked about him. The glorious 
sunlight of the preceding day had gone; the 
glittering greenery that had frolicked with the 
breeze was no longer to be seen. The trees along 
the roadside were gnarled, stunted, sombre; the 
bushes were scarcely more than brambles. Bleak- 
ness covered everything. Grass, such as it was, 
showed itself only in patches ; the soil was stony, 
the air chill. 

The traveller wrapped his cloak about him. 
Whether his senses were sharpened by the dreari- 
ness of his surroundings, or whether they instinc- 
tively sought a new object for their attention, he 
could not say; but be became aware, gradually, 
— as a sound sleeper slowly wakes to the things 
about his bed, — of some one beside him, travel- 
ling the same way, taking, it seemed, even steps 
with himself. He felt no surprise, but rather as 

no 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW III 

if he were picking up a memory that had been 
lying just under the surface of consciousness, — 
as if he ought to have known that some one had 
been beside him for an indefinite time. 

The traveller walked on for a while in silence ; 
and then, overcome half by curiosity, half by a 
mixture of resentment and suspicion, turned and 
demanded a little curtly where the other was 
going. 

" I am going your way," replied the stranger, 
and the two walked on together, side by side. 

"I beg your pardon," said the traveller, "but I 
know, as I am immersed in my own thoughts, 
that I cannot be an acceptable companion. We 
had better journey singly ; I will go ahead or fall 
behind, as you choose." 

"I prefer to keep even pace," answered the 
other. 

Hardly knowing whether or not to be offended, 
the traveller hesitated ; should he go ahead or fall 
behind .? But, though he could not tell why, he 
did neither ; he kept on the same road at the same 
pace, step by step, with his companion. 

The landscape grew still more desolate; the 
earth seemed hostile to vegetable life. A rare 
tree, here and there, shook its barren branches; 
prickly things rendered the walking difficult. 



112 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

The traveller thought to himself : " I will turn 
round and go back, and so I shall both leave this 
detestable place and escape from this importunate 
companion." 

The stranger spoke up : " No, let us keep on 
together." 

The traveller started, and making a feeble 
attempt to smile, said, " You seem to be a mind- 
reader." He decided to stop at once ; neverthe- 
less he continued to keep on the same road at the 
same pace. Then he thought, forgetting that he 
had not spoken aloud, " It was not polite in me to 
let him know that I wished to shake myself free 
of his company. 1 will quietly turn oflF to the 
right or left." 

" No, let us keep on the same road," repeated 
the stranger. 

At this the traveller contained himself no longer, 
but burst out, almost angrily, "Who are you .?" 

" I am the Spirit of Life," answered the other ; 
"you and I are journeying together." 

The traveller did not understand what the 
stranger meant; but he was aware of a bitter 
chill in the air and of still greater desolation all 
about, and he determined to cast manners to the 
wind and run for it ; but no, his feet kept on the 
same way, at the same pace. 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW II3 

"Be not impatient," said his companion, "this 
is our road." 

The chill struck through the traveller's cloak, 
his fingers trembled with cold, but he kept on. 
As they crossed the brow of a low hill they saw a 
great, gloomy building lying before them. The 
traveller thought of fortresses and prisons in for- 
eign lands that he had read of. 

"I shall turn here and go back," he cried, 
amazed at the foolish terror of his imagination. 

"We must go on," replied the stranger. 

They were now close under the shadow of the 
building. 

"What is this abhorrent place?" asked the 
traveller. 

"This," answered his companion, taking the 
traveller's arm, "is the House of Sorrow." 

The traveller felt a sword pierce his heart, yet 
his footsteps did not fail; for, against his will, 
the Spirit of Life bore him up. He went on with 
even step, and the two crossed the threshold. 

I 

They that have experienced a great sorrow are 
born again. The world they are now in is quite 
different from their old world. In that earlier 
world they lived upon terms of household familiar- 



114 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

ity with Joy and Felicity ; now they must lie down 
by the side of Sorrow and eat with Sorrow beside 
them at the board. Outward things may assert 
their identity to eye, to ear, to touch, but outward 
things cannot deceive the spirit within ; the 
House of Sorrow is strange, all its furniture is 
strange, and the newcomer must learn anew how 
to live. 

The first lesson is to accept the past as a beau- 
tiful day that is done, as the loveliness of a rose 
that has withered away. The object of our yearn- 
ing has passed from the world of actual contacts 
into the world of art. Memory may paint the 
picture as it will, drop out all shadows and catch 
the beauty of our exquisite loss in all the golden 
glow of human happiness. There, within the 
shrine prepared by Sorrow, that picture will ever 
refresh us and bless us. Evil cannot touch it, nor 
ill-will, nor envy, nor sordid care; only our own 
faithlessness, our own acceptance of unworthy 
things, can stain the freshness of its beauty. Sor- 
row has constituted us the sacristans of this 
shrine; on us rests the care of this pictured 
relic, and, unless we suffer motes and beams 
to get in our eyes, it will remain as bright in 
the sanctuary of memory as in the sunshine of 
earthly life. 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW II5 

The second lesson is to receive from Sorrow the 
gift that we have all asked for, begged for, a thou- 
sand times. We have felt the oppression of petty 
things, we have been caught in the nets of gross- 
ness, we have suffered ourselves to become cap- 
tives and servants to the common and the mean, 
till, weary with servitude, we have cried out, 
*'0h, that I might rescue my soul!" And now 
the work of deliverance is accomplished and our 
souls are free. Tyranny has fallen from our necks. 
Vulgar inclinations have lost their ancient glamour, 
and the baser appetites shiver in their nakedness. 
Our wish has been granted ; the prison doors are 
open wide, we may pursue with all our strength, 
with all the resolution we can summon, the things 
which we, when bound, believed that we longed 
for. 

The third gift of Sorrow is that she will not 
suffer us to put up with artificial lights. We 
had been content with the candle-light of sensu- 
ous things, letting our souls float idly on the clouds 
of chance experience ; we had accepted life as a 
voyage down a magic river of random happenings, 
satisfied with such beacons as guarded our tem- 
poral prosperity. But Sorrow, with one sweep of 
her hand, has extinguished all those lights, and 
robbed the things of sense of all their shimmering. 



Il6 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

Sorrow has shown us that we live in the dark ; and 
no great harm has been done, for we no longer care 
to see the flickering lights that once flared about 
our heads with so deceptive a glow. Sorrow has 
given us a yearning for inextinguishable light. All 
is dark; but all darkness is one great supplication 
for light which cannot be quenched. Shadow, 
mystery, blackness, the outer and the inner courts 
of chaos, all echo Sorrow's cry for light. 

So the soul into which the iron has entered, 
amazed and oiFended by the bitterness of agony, 
turns to find some light, some principle, whose 
shining shall illume for her these random happen- 
ings of joy and sorrow which make up what we 
call life, whose wisdom shall satisfy her passionate 
demand for some explanation why she should 
have been conjured up out of nothingness, to be 
caressed and flattered for a season, and then 
stabbed to the heart. What is this universe that 
treats us so ? What animates it ? What is it 
trying to do ^ What is its attitude toward man f 

Who shall explain these things .? We have lost 
the support of the Christian dogmas, and we have 
no new staff to lean upon ; we have strayed from 
the old road of hope, and we do not find a new 
road. What can science or philosophy do for us, 
— science that pays so little heed to the soul. 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW II7 

philosophy that pays so little heed to grief? We 
must shift for ourselves and see what we can find. 
Happiness left us content with happiness, but 
Sorrow bids us rise up and seek something divine. 
The first act must be to lift our eyes from 
Sorrow, cast memory loose, put on the magic cap 
of indifference and forgetfulness, and look out as 
from a window upon the phenomena that may 
chance to meet the eye, and see whether from the 
sample we can infer a pattern, interwoven with a 
thread of hope, for the whole fabric. 

II 

I look at the universe as it presents itself to me 
this morning, as if I, for the first time, were making 
its acquaintance. I find myself in a pleasant room. 
Golden light, pouring in at the window, irradiates 
shining breakfast things. A wonderful odour 
greets my nostrils ; a steaming fragrance, followed 
by a delicious taste, quickens my whole being. 
Next, round yellow fruit is presented to me, 
smelling as if it remembered all its blossoming 
origins or had packed its rind with ambrosia in 
the garden of the Hesperides. Added to these is a 
delicious bread, rich Rembrandtesque brown 
without, ripe yellow within, a princely kind of 
bread, which they tell me is called Johnny-cake. 



Il8 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

Breakfast done, I walk out into an unroofed 
azure palace of light. Upon the ground a multi- 
tude of little green stalks intertwine with each 
other to keep my feet from touching the soil be- 
neath ; mighty giants, rooted to earth, hold up a 
hundred thousand leaves to shelter me from the 
excess of golden glory that illumines the azure 
palace; the leaves rustle, either for the music's 
sake or to let me feel their sentiment of kinship. 
Further on, little beautiful things, which have re- 
nounced locomotion, — recognizing that they have 
found their appointed places and are happy there, 
Hke the Lady Pia in the lower heaven of Paradise, 
— waft floral benedictions to me. And about 
them hover winged flowers that spread their petals 
to the breeze and flit from fragrance to fragrance. 
Into a honey-laden cornucopia, a passionate 
presence, its wings humming in wild ecstasy, dips 
its bill, while the sunlight burnishes the jewelled 
magnificence of its plumage. 

A troop of young creatures, far more wonderful 
than these, passes by, with glancing eyes and rosy 
cheeks, making sweetest music of words and 
laughter. These, they tell me, are children, and 
they say that there are many of them, and that I, 
too, was once a child. I laugh at this preposter- 
ous flattery. 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW II9 

Another being, well-nigh ethereal, a naiad per- 
haps, or the imagining of some kindly god, trips by. 
It is exquisite. The leaves cast their shadows 
before it; the flowers tremble for pleasure. 
"What is it?" I whisper. Some one answers 
carelessly: "That is a maiden." 

Then another young creature dances by, — 
head erect, all animation, the breeze blowing its 
hair back from what must be a temple for pure and 
noble thought — like a gallant ship beating out 
to sea. This, they tell me, is a youth. 

I walk on and behold many goodly things. I 
hear melodies that stir yearnings to which I can 
give no name, start flashes of joy, or glimmering 
understandings of the "deep and dazzling dark- 
ness" that surrounds the farthest reaches of ter- 
restrial light. I am told that there are men, 
called poets, who have built a palace out of their 
crystal imaginations, where life and its doings are 
depicted in a thousand ways, sometimes as in a 
mirror, trait for trait, sometimes glorified, and all 
in varied cadences of music. And I am told that 
the wonderful things which greet my senses — dry 
land and its fruitfulness, ocean, air, clouds, stars, 
and sky — are but an infinitesimal fragment of an 
infinite whole, in which the curious mind may 
travel for countless ages and never reach the end 



I20 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

of eager and throbbing questionings ; that there 
is between me and it the most wonderful of all 
relations, the contact, real or imaginary, of my 
consciousness with the great stream of phenomena 
that passes before it, and that this relation is the 
source of never-ending intellectual pleasure. 

But more than by all things else I am impressed 
by the sentiments between creatures of my kind, 
between mother and son, father and daughter, 
husband and wife, friend and friend, a wonderful 
mutual attraction which makes each yield his will 
to the other and rouses a double joy, — from 
securing for the other and from renouncing for 
one's self, — a half-mystical bond that holds two 
together as gravitation holds terrestrial things to 
the earth, so sweet, so strong, so delicate, that the 
imagination cannot rise beyond this human af- 
fection at its height. 

Such is the fragment of the universe which pre- 
sents itself at this moment to my consciousness. 
Bewildered by wonders heaped on wonders, I 
cry out triumphantly, "Is there not evidence of 
friendliness to man here?" 

Ill 

But men of science answer. No. The cause or 
causes behind all that exists, they say, are neither 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW 121 

friendly nor unfriendly ; they are unconscious, in- 
different, inexorable ; they act willy nilly. They 
are blind forces. The attitude that man must 
hold toward them is an attitude neither of rever- 
ence nor worship ; he must be wary, ever on his 
guard, and quick with intellectual curiosity. And 
Science gives names and more names to every move- 
ment, to every aspect, of the manifestations of 
force. And then when Science has defined and 
enumerated, and redefined and reenumerated to 
its heart's content, it expects us to look up m 
wonder and be grateful, as if names and defini- 
tions brought with them health and happiness. 
We do wonder, but we can feel no gratitude. We 
follow, as best we can, the teachings of Science. 
We acknowledge our incompetence, our ignorance, 
our inability to appreciate what we are taught. 
But to us an enumeration of processes and stages 
does not seem to be an explanation ; that enumera- 
tion sounds as hollow to us as if science were to 
explain our personal existences by recounting 
every step our feet have taken since we first set 
foot to floor. Moreover, men of science bewilder 
us by their respect, pushed almost to obsequious- 
ness, for bigness and littleness, for nearness and 
distance, for chemical energy and physical rest- 
lessness. Why should consciousness hold its 



122 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

breath before the very great or the very little, 
why should it duck and bend before unconscious 
energy ? And where is the explanation or under- 
standing of our two worlds, more real to us than 
ponderable matter or restless energy, our world 
of happiness and our world of sorrow ? 

We turn for enlightenment to the Spirit of Life ; 
but the Spirit of Life answers : 

"My concern is with life, not with knowledge.'* 

"Whom, then, shall we ask ?" 

"Ask Pain and ask Love," replies the Spirit 
of Life. 

Like little Jack Horner, science pulls out its 
plums, — electricity, radium, the chemical union 
of elements, the multiplication of cells, — and, 
like Jack, congratulates itself. But to the inmates 
of the House of Sorrow, far more wonderful than 
all these things, far more mysterious, and de- 
manding subtler thought, is human affection. 
For a generation past, human affection has been 
treated, and for years to come may still be treated, 
as the superfluous product of physico-chemical 
energies. The scientific mind, elated by its vic- 
tories, bivouacs on the old fields of battle. But 
the real interest in atom and cell lies in the human 
consciousness, and the interest in consciousness 
lies in the human affections. In themselves elec- 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW 123 

trons and cells are neither wonderful nor interest- 
ing; they are merely strange, and can claim only 
the attention due to strangers. But human love 
is of boundless interest to man, and should have the 
pious devotion of the wisest and most learned men. 

Science proceeds as if the past were the home 
of explanation ; whereas the future, and the future 
alone, holds the key to the mysteries of the present. 
When the first cell divided, the meaning of that 
division was to be discovered in the future, not in 
the past; when some prehuman ancestor first 
uttered a human sound, the significance of that 
sound was to be interpreted by human language, 
not by apish grunts ; when the first plant showed 
solicitude for its seed, the interest of that solici- 
tude lay in the promise of maternal affection. 
Things must be judged in the light of the coming 
morning, not of the setting stars. 

It is not the past which, like an uncoiling spring, 
pushes us on; creation faces the future, and is 
drawn onward by an irresistible attraction. "For 
though it be a maxim in the schools," says Thomas 
Traherne, *'that there is no love of a thing unknown^ 
yet I have found that things unknown have a 
secret influence on the soul, and, like the centre of 
the earth unseen, violently attract it. We love 
we know not what. ... As iron at a distance is 



124 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

drawn by the loadstone, there being some invisi- 
ble communications between them, so is there in 
us a world of love to somewhat, though we know 
not what. . . . There are invisible ways of con- 
veyance by which some great thing doth touch our 
souls, and by which we tend to it. Do you not 
feel yourself drawn by the expectation and desire 
of some Great Thing .?" 

Life seems to have differentiated itself, develop- 
ing a Promethean spirit within a grosser element. 
Life as a whole cares only to preserve itself, it 
seeks to live, it cringes and will accept existence 
on any terms, it will adapt itself to desert or dung- 
hill ; but the Promethean spirit seeks a higher and 
a higher sphere. This life within life — this cor 
cordium of existence — is surely travelling on a 
definite road. The very passion with which it 
takes its direction, its readiness to seize on pain 
and use to the full pain's ennobling properties, are 
our assurance that life follows an instinct within 
that guides it to that which is either its source or 
its full fruition. We must interpret the seed by 
the flower, not the flower by the seed. We must 
interpret life by its deepest attributes, by pain and 
by love. 

Pain has been explained as an accompaniment of 
the Promethean spirit of life, which, in precipitate 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW 1 25 

haste to proceed upon its journey, takes the 
most ready and efficacious path onward, heedless 
of what it breaks and crushes on the way. But 
pain is rather an impulse within the spirit of Hfe. 
Pain is its conscience urging it on. Unless we 
were pricked on by pain, we should wish to stand 
still, content with our own satisfaction, meanly 
indifferent to higher pleasures ; without pain all 
life might have been content to house itself in low 
animal forms, and wallow in bestiality, ease, and 
lust. It may be that the onward progress might 
have been accomplished without pain ; we might 
have been whirled upward, insensible, toward the 
universal goal. But we have received the priv- 
ilege of consciously sharing in the upward journey, 
so that each onward movement must be a wrench 
from the past, each moment a parting, each step 
an eternal farewell. These noble inconstancies 
are tasks imposed by pain. 

In its humblest capacity pain serves as a danger 
signal for the body's health, or as punishment for 
precautions neglected ; even here, however, it is 
more spiritual than corporeal, for it is the means 
by which the soul arouses the body to perpetual 
vigilance in the service of Life. Pain must con- 
cern itself with corporeal things, because con- 
sciousness is dependent upon the body ; it must 



126 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

discharge Its share of the general tribute that con- 
sciousness, as a dependency, pays to the body. 
But such services as pain may render in the ma- 
terial world cannot account for all pain; they 
cannot account for the heartache, for the depth 
and breadth of anguish, for the sombre majesty of 
grief. An explanation must be sought elsewhere. 

Pain is a function of the soul ; it fosters the 
preservation and spiritual growth of conscious life. 
The pangs of conscience, the agony of the heart, 
nourish the tenderer elements of consciousness; 
they root out the docks and darnels of worldly 
pleasure, and so protect the little nurslings of the 
spirit that would else have been choked, nursing 
them with passion and tears, as Nature nurses 
with sunshine and with rain. 

No man can say by what means inorganic 
matter brought forth organic creation; nor can 
we say how the corporeal organism, seemingly 
content with processes of material decomposition 
and reintegration, generated mind. These great 
deeds were done in the dark, they have left no wit- 
nesses ; but we have the testimony of our feelings 
that- some momentous change, comparable to 
these great changes, is even now taking place, 
however slow its progress may be. Consciousness, 
in its own ideal world, is seething with independent 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW 1 27 

vitality, eager to develop itself, eager to give 
birth to a more spiritual state, eager to help Life 
take another great onward step. The excesses of 
pain, that serve no corporeal purpose, seem to be 
caused by the violent efforts of the Spirit of Life 
In its struggles to take such a step ; but, in reality, 
pain Is the cause rather than the effect. 

Charged, therefore, with such possibilities in 
the service of Life, pain — its capacities little 
taxed by duties of guardianship and nurture — 
rises to nobler offices; It gradually becomes a 
closer and closer companion to Life, it twines its 
tendrils round the tree of Life, it grafts Itself on 
like a branch, and becomes incorporate with Life 
itself, an essential element In vital energy, a func- 
tion of some vital, spiritual organ. Yet this or- 
gan Is not yet established at a definite task, for 
at times pain seems to be the trenchant edge of 
the Life spirit, cutting and purging the soul from 
whatever may Impede her upward progress ; at 
times. In the soul's more tranquil moods, pain 
seems to be a homesickness for the home that Life 
aspires to create. Moreover, pain partakes of 
the vast variety of Life ; It announces the prick 
of a needle on the finger, or sweeps over the soul 
in the beauty of tragedy with awe-inspiring flight. 
Science, which deals with the things that are past. 



128 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

unable to fit pain into utilitarian categories, re- 
peats its vaso-motor formulas ; but faith, which 
deals with things that are to be, hails it as the 
prophet of a new heaven and a new earth. What 
better explanation of pain is there than that it is 
the birth pangs of spirit, the assurance of new 
things unseen ? 

[ In this work of lifting life to a higher stage, 
pain is but one of many ministers, the most 
terrible, the most efficient. All the forces of life 
work to that end. The struggle for life, often as- 
cribed to the egotism of the individual, is not 
properly so ascribed. That struggle is undertaken 
in obedience to the law of upward progress. Each 
vegetable and animal is in honor bound to carry 
on its individual life to the uttermost, for who 
can tell before the event what road Life will take 
upon its upward journey. Each is bound to make 
itself a path for Life to take. The acorn, the seed 
of the dandelion, the spawn of the herring, the 
man-child, must hold themselves always ready to 
carry Life upon the next onward stage; each 
claims the honor for itself and chooses to kill and 
to risk death rather than forego the chance of such 
supreme dignity. In the struggle for self-preser- 
vation lies the fulfilment of the creature's alle- 
giance to life. The struggle for life means pain 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW 1 29 

inflicted and pain received; but in pain lies the 
honor of the organic world. We cannot imagine 
nobility or dignity without pain. Lower things 
do not experience it. Common men always flee 
from it and execrate it ; but, now and then, here 
and there, men and women seek it out. They 
may quiver in agony, they may succumb momen- 
tarily to the weakness of the flesh, but they bear 
witness that pain is good. For them pain is the 
ploughing and harrowing which must precede 
seed-time and harvest. These men we have 
been taught to call saints and heroes. Shall we 
give no weight to their testimony ? 

IV 

As It IS with pain, so is it with human love. 
Each is a turning toward the light ahead. The 
mutual attraction of cells has no meaning till it 
appears as the first eff"ort of nature on her way to 
produce human affection. At every stage in the 
drawing together of cells and multiples of cells, 
whether in polyp, reptile, or ape, the significance 
of that drawing together lies in that for which 
it is preparing the way. So, too, is it with human 
aff'ections : they shine with a light not their own, 
but reflected from the higher significance of the 
future. Our love is but a pale anticipation of that 



130 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

love which the universe is striving to round out 
to full-orbed completeness. Love, at least, offers 
an explanation of the goal of life, — life struggling 
to consciousness, consciousness rising to love. All 
other things find their explanation in something 
higher, but love is its own fulfilment. 

Love has no doubts. To itself love is the very- 
substance of reality. The phenomena of sight, 
sound, touch, and their fellows, are but the con- 
ditions under which life has made a foothold for 
itself in this boisterous world ; the senses know 
nothing beyond their own functioning, they have 
nothing to say regarding the end or purpose of life. 
But to love, — all the labor and effort of all the 
universe, with all its sidereal systems, with all its 
ethereal immensity, has been for the sake of pro- 
ducing love. Of what consequence is it, whether 
insensible matter endure a myriad years, or as- 
sume infinite bigness .? In the absence of con- 
sciousness, an infinity of matter is as nothing. 
One flash of conscious life illumined by love is 
worth all the patience, all the effort, all the labor, 
of unconscious energy throughout an infinity of 
time. Consciousness is but a minister to love, 
to the love that is to be. 

Science, with its predilection for sensuous things, 
for enumerations, classifications, explanations, 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW 131 

in terms of matter and energy, asserts that con- 
sciousness fulfils no useful function at all. Con- 
sciousness is an accidental creation, shot out like 
a random spark by the friction of living, a sort 
of tramp that has stolen a ride on the way. Ac- 
cording to this theory the musician would con- 
tinue to play his fiddle whether he produced a 
melody or not; the endless chain of propulsions 
from behind would impel one hand to finger 
the strings, the other to ply the bow. But 
to the non-scientific man, consciousness is the 
achievement to which the universe has bent all 
its energies. 

Had the universe taken a different turn, or 
had it neglected the things which it has done, 
consciousness as we know it would never have 
come into being. But consciousness has come, 
and the assertion that it is a superfluous thing, 
an accident, seems to have been hatched from the 
very wilfulness of arrogance. Because science — 
a virtuoso in motion, in attractions and repulsions 
— has not yet discovered the function of con- 
sciousness, is it not premature to say that con- 
sciousness has no function ? To the common 
mind the obvious function of consciousness — 
in addition to the minor occupations which its 
genesis from matter has imposed upon it — is to 



132 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

experience love, and thereby give a reasonable 
meaning to the universe. 

If matter, or energy, has succeeded in creating 
consciousness, even though only on our planet and 
in such little measure, may it not be that after 
other aeons of restless activity, consciousness in 
its turn shall generate another state of being to 
which science (then absorbed by a predilection for 
consciousness, as it is now absorbed by its predi- 
lection for sensuous things) will deny any useful 
function, but which shall justify itself as conscious- 
ness does to-day ? May it not be — if we let our- 
selves listen to the incantations of hope — that 
this higher spiritual sensitiveness, generated by 
consciousness, will create as much difference be- 
tween the new order of creatures that shall possess 
it and ourselves, as there is now between us and 
inorganic matter ? Does not the experience of 
those men who — in daily life scarce realizing 
material things — have felt themselves rapt into 
the presence of God, point to some such inference ? 
"When love has carried us above all things . . . 
we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, 
enfolding us and penetrating us." But whatever 
our laboring, sweating universe may bring forth, 
this seems to be the direction it has taken, the 
goal that it has set before itself. 



THE HOUSE OF SORROW I33 

Is it not odd that men should continue to inter- 
pret love in terms of the atom and the cell, of 
chemistry and physics, when the whole signifi- 
cance of all the doings of matter and energy comes 
from our human consciousness ? 

But shall they that suffer pain to-day, that have 
once lived in the Eden of love, shall these enter 
into the light of the day that is to dawn ? 

Epilogue 

The traveller sighed, lost in perplexity; and the 
Spirit of Life said, "Come, let us walk in the courts 
of the House of Sorrow." So they walked through 
the courts, and the newcomer beheld in the House 
a great multitude of windows, most of which were 
dark, as if there was no light within, or, as if the 
curtains were drawn and the shutters closed. But 
other windows shot forth rays of light, some faint 
and feeble, some stronger, while others poured 
forth a flood of brightness. 

"Why are some of the windows so bright?" 
inquired the newcomer ; and the Spirit of Life 
answered, "Those are the windows of the light- 
bearers ; their inmates display lights, some more, 
some less." 

"With what do they feed their lights .?" asked 
the newcomer. 



134 THE HOUSE OF SORROW 

"A few shine of their own nature," answered 
the Spirit, "as if they drew upon an inexhaustible 
source within ; but most of them burn the oil of 
hope." 

"If they have no hope, what then ?" asked the 
newcomer. 

"Then," said the Spirit, "they must make their 
light from pain. There is an old saying, *He that 
doth not burn, shall not give forth light.' The 
past lightened you with its brightness; but by 
your own shining you must lighten the present 
and the future. Hope gives the readier light; 
but even if hope fail, none need leave their windows 
dark, for where you have pain at your disposal, 
unlimited pain, it should not require great spiritual 
ingenuity to use that pain for fuel." 

The newcomer bowed his head, and the Spirit 
of Life led him to his appointed room within the 
house. 



A FORSAKEN GOD 



An Englishman of letters who, in the eyes of 
Americans at least, embodies the spirit of Oxford 
and Cambridge, expressed not long ago certain 
frank opinions about America. What motive 
induced him to tell the world what he thinks of 
us ? It could not have been mere excitement 
over novel experiences. Englishmen of letters 
no longer write about America in the spirit of 
explorers. Mr. Lowes Dickinson could hardly 
have appeared to himself — reflected in the deli- 
cate mirror of his mind — as a gentleman adven- 
turer, staring from a peak of Greek culture at our 
amazing characteristics, and differing from stout 
Cortez mainly in not being silent. The war had 
not yet begun ; there was no motive for bringing 
gentle suasion — such as may be implied in any 
expression of British interest in America — to 
bear upon our neutrality. The readiest explana- 
tion of his writing is that he was prompted by a 
simple motive : he wrote under the need of say- 
ing what was on his mind. This is the very kind 

I3S 



136 A FORSAKEN GOD 

of criticism to give ear to. When the human 
heart must unburden itself of a load, it neither 
flatters nor detracts; it acts instinctively with 
no thought of consequences. The mood is a mood 
of truth. The man who speaks the truth to us is 
our best friend, and we should always listen to him. 

Among other things Mr. Dickinson said, "De- 
scribe the average Western man and you describe 
the American ; from east to west, from north to 
south, everywhere and always the same — master- 
ful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, and at 
once good-natured and brutal, kind if you do not 
cross him, ruthless if you do, greedy, ambitious, 
self-reliant, active for the sake of activity, intel- 
ligent and unintellectual, quick-witted and crass, 
contemptuous of ideas but amorous of devices, 
valuing nothing but success, recognizing nothing 
but the actual. . . . 

"The impression America makes on me is 
that the windows are blocked up. It has be- 
come incredible that this continent was colonized 
by the Pilgrim Fathers. . . . Religion is becom- 
ing a department of practical business. The 
churches — orthodox and unorthodox, old and 
new, Christian, Christian-Scientific, theosophic, 
higher-thinking — vie with one another in ad- 
vertising goods which are all material benefits : 



A FORSAKEN GOD 137 

'Follow me, and you will get rich/ * Follow me, 
and you will get well,' Tollow me, and you will 
be cheerful, prosperous, successful/ Religion m 
America is nothing if not practical." 

Some Americans do not like this criticism. 
They protest that the critic has no eye for the 
essential qualities which render our country dear 
to us, that he gazes dimly, through a mist of Cam- 
bridge traditions, from some spleen-producmg 
point of vision, upon a people spiritually remote 
from him. Human nature instinctively lays 
flattering unction to its soul ; but there is only 
one right way to take the fault-finding of an intel- 
lectual and highly educated man, and that is to 
see how much truth there is in his fault-finding 
and then strive to correct our faults. Most 
Americans do not care about the opinions of 
Oxford and Cambridge; they say that we must 
be a law unto ourselves, and absorb nourishment 
from the sunshine of our own self-esteem. But 
others, less robust, do set store by the opinion of 
scholars bred, for the greater part, upon the re- 
corded mind of the most gifted people that has 
ever Hved in Europe, — upon the books of Homer 
and Pindar, .Eschylus and Euripides, Plato and 
Aristotle, and their fellows. It will do us less 
harm to assume that there is too much truth m 



138 A FORSAKEN GOD 

what Mr. Dickinson has said of us, than to as- 
sume that there is none. 

II 

Sixty or seventy years ago, a definite concep- 
tion of the moral and intellectual mould upon 
which men should shape themselves, appeared to 
be solidly established. That conception was defin- 
ite and readily accepted because it actually had 
been embodied in a living man, Johann Wolfgang 
von Goethe. Emerson, Lowell, Bayard Taylor, 
each in his respective way, and all other leaders 
of thought in America, acknowledged Goethe as 
the model for man, as an intellectual being, to 
strive to imitate. 

Goethe's position seemed as secure as Shak- 
spere's, Dante's, or Homer's. Lower than they 
in the supreme heights of song, he was more uni- 
versal. He had composed poetry that in peculiar 
sweetness rivalled the Elizabethan lyrics and sur- 
passed them in variety and depth of thought ; he 
had written a play judged equal to Hamlet or the 
Book of Job; he had written romances that 
rivalled / Promessi Sposi in nice depiction of the 
soul's workings, and were as interesting in their 
delineation of human life as the most romantic of 
the Waverley Novels. He had been the chief 



A FORSAKEN GOD 139 

counsellor of a sovereign prince, and had devised 
wise policy in a hundred matters of statecraft. 
His mind had put forth ideas as a tree in spring- 
time puts forth leaves; his speculations had 
travelled in wide fields of scientific thought ; he 
had divined certain processes concerning the 
origin of species in a manner that still associates 
his name with the names of Lamarck and Darwin. 
He was accoutred with a radiant intelligence, with 
unmatched cultivation, with wide sympathies ; he 
was free from prejudice to a degree unequalled 
in our modern world. His intellectual impartiality 
had inspired a sect of persons with the creed that 
the home of man is the free mind, and that his coun- 
try is coterminous with the whole range of truth. 
Great as were his feats in literature and in 
science, his special achievement was the creation 
of his ideal for the living of life, an ideal that 
seemed founded on so broad a base that it could 
but be a question of time and perception for it to 
be universally acknowledged and adopted. More 
than any man, from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, 
from Aquinas to Auguste Comte, he seemed to 
have a true view of the ideal proper for the human 

spirit. 

Goethe's ideal embraces freedom from the 
prejudices of home and education, clearness of 



140 A FORSAKEN GOD 

vision, courage in the teeth of circumstance, an 
ordered Ufe, a discipHned spirit, an unclouded 
soul, the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of 
knowledge, and the disinterested worship of what- 
ever is perfect. 

NobiHty, order, measure, and the underlying 
feeling of peace, are primary elements in Goethe's 
ideal. These quaHties, if there be any remedy 
anywhere, make the antidote to the evils which, 
according to Mr. Lowes Dickinson, beset us. 
They exalt the things of the intellect, and take 
away temptation to the "unscrupulous," "brutal" 
pursuit of material things. And more medicinal 
than all the others is Goethe's belief in inward 
peace. Under the impulsion of instinct, we Ameri- 
cans move to and fro, go up and down, and turn 
about. We seek satisfaction for our appetites in 
activity. Goethe lived in the world and was of 
the world, and yet he sought peace of soul. He 
sought peace, not to escape from the world, but 
to gain greater dominion over it. He hoped to 
obtain greater control over the happenings of Hfe, 
— greater power to put them to use and to enjoy- 
ment, — by penetrating into the deeps of serenity ; 
he desired mastery over self as a means to inward 
peace, and inward peace as a means to mastery 
over life. 



A FORSAKEN GOD 141 

We have drifted so far from the opinions of 
Emerson and his contemporaries, and — if Mr. 
Dickinson is right in his criticisms — we have so 
completely lost sight of the example set by Goethe, 
that I will expatiate a little upon what Goethe was, 
and might still be to us. 

Ill 

For Goethe, inward peace was not the final 
goal, but a stage on the way; or, rather, it was 
the sustenance of life, the means of right living, 
the power that should help him become himself, 
help him grow to his full stature. And the prob- 
lem of his self-education was how to attain this 
inward peace. For him, as for all seekers in the 
Christian past, the conventional way would have 
been to follow Christian teachings ; and there is 
evidence that Christian teachings touched him, 
touched him deeply. They stirred him somewhat 
as Gothic architecture stirred his enthusiasm in 
youth. But the whole trend of his nature pre- 
vented this. To Goethe the mediaeval search- 
ings after God were dead hypotheses; the road 
that led Richard of St. Victor or St. Francis of 
Assisi to peace, was to him a blind alley. Goethe 
did not wish to escape from the world, from its 
perturbations and disquiet. He desired inward 



142 A FORSAKEN GOD 

peace, as a hero, resolute to fight and conquer, 
might wish for a shield. 

Another path was to follow the precepts of the 
pagan philosophers, such counsels as the imperial 
spokesman of ancient Stoicism gives : "Men seek 
retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea- 
shores, and mountains ; but this is altogether a 
mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in 
a man's power, whenever he shall choose, to retire 
into himself. For nowhere either with more 
quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man 
retire than into his own soul, particularly when 
he has within him such thoughts that by looking 
into them he is immediately in perfect tran- 
quillity ; and I affirm that tranquillity is nothing 
else than the good ordering of the mind.*' 

The Stoics wished to retire into their own souls 
in order that they might come back to the world 
free from discontent with worldly things ; whereas, 
Goethe wished to come back into the world with 
power to dominate worldly things. He was there- 
fore obliged to devise a path for himself, a path 
far nearer to the pagan than to the Christian 
path, but still a new path. Might not a devout 
man, one who believed that ''Das Schaudern ist 
der Menschheit hestes Teil'^ — that "the tremu- 
lous sense of awe is man's noblest attribute," — 



A FORSAKEN GOD I43 

attain peace by way of the intellect, by living life 
in noble completeness? The affirmative answer 
was the essential thesis of Goethe's life. He 
maintained this not so much by what he wrote, as 
by his conduct. He was no disciple of the mys- 
tics ; he did not propose to overcome this life of 
phenomena by passing beyond phenomena, but 
by comprehending them. He never aspired to 
spread his wings and fly to Heaven ; he kept his 
feet planted on soUd earth. Madame de Stael 
says: *' Goethe ne per d jamais terre, tout en atteig- 
nant aux conceptions les plus sublimes'* — "Goethe 
never quits the earth, even when reaching up to 
the most sublime ideas." And yet his firm stand 
upon earth and his concern with things of this 
world did not tempt him to adopt worldly meas- 
ures. "On diroit quil nest pas atteint par la vie" 
— "the things of this world do not seem to touch 
him." These qualities of his that Madame de 
Stael noted are signs that the seeker had attained. 
All, or almost all, testimony concerning Goethe's 
presence, his manner, his dignity, is in accord. 
To Eckermann, who did not see him till he was an 
old man, he seemed ''wie einer, der von himm- 
lischem Frieden ganz erfilllt w^" — "like a man 
brimful of heavenly peace." All his life he 
sought knowledge, for, as he beHeved, knowledge 



144 A FORSAKEN GOD 

begets understanding, and understanding sym- 
pathy, and sympathy brings the spirit into harmony 
with all things, and harmony engenders peace. 
Goethe is the great embodiment of the return 
of the modern mind to the religion of the classic 
spirit, seeking inward peace, not in an unseen 
heaven, but in "the good ordering of the mind." 

Goethe's seeking was not the seeking of a 
man of letters ; it was not prompted by the artist's 
instinct, not consciously adopted as a means to 
master his art ; it was the seeking of the human 
spirit for the road to salvation on earth. Take 
the long series of his works, — poems, plays, 
novels, criticisms ; they reveal no obsessing pre- 
occupation with the attainment of a high serenity 
of soul. They represent the adventures of his 
spirit with the multitudinous happenings of 
human life. But here and there, like light 
through a chink, flashes out evidence of the direc- 
tion in which his soul is set. 

Nevertheless, the dominance of the idea of in- 
ward peace is far more apparent from the story 
of his life than from his writings. Peace shaped 
itself in his mind not as a Nirvana, not as a rapt 
contemplation of God, but as harmony, as a state 
of inward unity, of a right relation to the universe, 
manifest to men as order, proportion, measure, 



A FORSAKEN GOD 145 

serenity, and therefore, necessarily, in relation to 
other men, as benevolence. In this he was 
powerfully helped by the strong intellectual in- 
fluence that swept over Germany in his youth, 
the admiration for classical art taught by Winckel- 
mann and Lessing. Under the teachings of these 
two men, the stately grandeur of classical sculp- 
ture and architecture appeared to be the summit 
of human attainment, the goal of imitation and 
effort. He learned that ^^ Das Ideal der Schonheit 
ist Einfalt und StilW — "the ideal of beauty is 
simplicity and repose." 

The theories of Winckelmann and of Lessing 
fermented in Goethe's mind, and, when he came 
to make his famous Italienische Reise, they fairly 
seethed and boiled. The beauty of repose became 
his sole idea of beauty. His admiration of the 
Ludovisi Juno, he says, was his first love affair in 
Italy. At Vicenza he stopped in admiration 
before the Palladian palaces. "When we stand 
face to face with these buildings, then we first 
realize their great excellence; their bulk and 
massiveness fill the eye, while the lovely harmony 
of their proportions, admirable in the advance 
and recession of perspective, brings peace to the 
spirit." When he went to Assisi, he gave a wide 
berth to the Basilica of St. Francis, half appre- 

L 



146 A FORSAKEN GOD 

hensive lest its Gothic elements might bring con- 
fusion into his thoughts, walked straight to the 
Temple of Minerva, and enjoyed "a spectacle 
that bestowed peace on both eye and mind." 
Deep in his nature, this preoccupation with what 
shall bring peace is hard at work. 

At bottom Goethe preferred art to life ; he pre- 
ferred to see the doings and passions of men 
reflected in the artist's mirror rather than to see 
them in the actual stuff" of existence. Naturally, 
the prevalent notion concerning the classical 
world as a world of harmony, of calm, of self- 
control, found his spirit most sympathetic. At 
the age of forty, on the return from his Italian 
travels, he accepted the great pagan tradition in 
the form that Marcus Aurelius left it: "It is in 
thy power to live free from all compulsion in the 
greatest tranquillity of mind. ... I affirm that 
tranquillity is nothing else than the good ordering 
of the mind." That to Goethe is the gist of all 
right thinking about life, and he spent his own 
long life in the eff'ort to express it in his behaviour. 

Goethe's idea of harmony, of beauty, of meas- 
ure, of right relations with the universe, was, of 
course, not a mere pagan ideal in the sense which 
we usually give to the word pagan ; it was essen- 
tially a religious conception, — religious rather in 



A FORSAKEN GOD 1 47 

the Hellenic than in the Hebraic sense, for the 
pagan element, with its tinge of pride in dominat- 
ing the untoward in life, is always there. In early 
life his religious sentiments were profoundly 
affected by the evangelical traditions of Protestant 
Germany, which saturated the atmosphere of 
Frankfort; afterwards they wore a more philo- 
sophical hue, but they were always strong enough 
to counteract the pagan inclination of his mind to 
rest content at the stage of peace attainable by 
knowledge and self-control. The problem before 
him was how to reconcile the transcendental im- 
pulses of his spirit with the ideal of a harmonious 
whole. For the most part, his anti-ecclesiastical 
conception of freedom, and the pagan training of 
his mind, turned him away from current Chris- 
tianity; he treated it as he treated the Basilica 
of St. Francis at Assisi, he simply did not go out 
of his way to look at it. He took much from 
Spinoza. The potential divinity within him in- 
spired him with reverence. He desired to gain 
the composure and elevation of soul becoming to 
a man who is animated by the divine spirit that 
permeates all nature. From Italy he wrote, "I 
should like to win eternity for my spirit." And 
after his return, he grew steadily more sensitive 
to the deep current that propels the soul toward 



148 A FORSAKEN GOD 

the unknown. Gradually he approached, by his 
own way, the borders of that spiritual region in 
which Plato puts the soul. Later he hid his face 
in thick clouds of symbolism ; but his mystical 
inclination — die Erhebung ins Unendliche — 
never dominated his notion of a complete human 
being with moral and intellectual nature fashioned 
on a heroic model, fit, as it were, to be lodged in 
a body carved by Skopas. He reached the point 
where he united harmoniously the sense of meas- 
ure, of beauty, of peace through knowledge, with 
a tremulous sensitiveness to the possibilities that 
tenant the vast unknown which surrounds our 
little kingdom of sense. 

To set forth such an ideal as this to the world 
was Goethe's self-appointed task. No other 
man, perhaps, in the whole history of the civilized 
world, has been so well fitted by nature and edu- 
cation for such a feat. Dante, a greater poet and 
a greater man, was too emotional, too passionate, 
ever to care to hold up what to him would have 
been the intolerable composure of the Stoic spirit. 
Cervantes, notwithstanding his clear-eyed com- 
passion and his high reverence for the spiritual 
light in the human soul, was far too lacking in 
general culture, even to essay the task. Milton 
was too partisan, too dogmatic; Shakspere too 



A FORSAKEN GOD 149 

averse to any idea of teaching men in any way 
other than by letting his sunshine play on human 
life. And, in our own day, Tolstoi became too 
blind to classical beauty and to harmony of the 
soul, too devoted to traditional Christian ideas, 
to be capable of any such endeavor. 

Goethe's calm spirit, his loyalty to fact, his 
habit "of standing on the solid earth," his prac- 
tice, as he says, *' Alle Dinge wie sie sind zu seheUy" 
— " to see all things as they are," — were to men 
of a rational way of thinking a guarantee that he 
would not, upon Daedalian wings, essay a flight 
of folly and destruction ; and his sensitiveness to 
those vague reactions and movings that stir in 
the deeps of the human spirit assured men with 
mystical yearnings that he was not cut off from 
their fellowship. For him, as well as for them, 
there is a region — whether it be in man's soul 
here and now, or elsewhere — where 

Alles Vergangliche 
1st nur ein Gleichniss; 
Das Unzulangliche 
Hier wird's Ereigniss. 

Or, as Bayard Taylor translates it : 

All things transitory 
But as symbols are sent; 
Earth's insufficiency 
Here grows to Event. 



150 A FORSAKEN GOD 

IV 

Here, then, was an ideal which, one would 
think, should have been a shining light to our 
world to-day, — the classic spirit embodied in 
man's life, manifesting beauty, harmony, meas- 
ure, self-restraint, accompanied by an open-eyed, 
unprejudiced outlook on all things old and new, 
and with all the windows which look toward 
things divine uncurtained and unshuttered. Why 
has it fallen ? 

It may be said that modern life is opposed to 
such an ideal as Goethe's ; and it may be — as 
Mr. Dickinson probably thinks — that American 
nature is too friable a material to endure the 
carving of Hellenic souls. But, be that as it may, 
it is apparent that the failure to follow Goethe's 
ideal is a universal failure, almost as pitiful in 
Europe as with us ; and the answer to the question, 
why has this ideal fallen, must be sought in causes 
that operate in Europe as well as in America. 

One can see plainly several forces, good and 
bad, at work, — among them, science, luxury, 
the national spirit, the humanitarian movement, 
and democracy. 

Science has drawn into its service a large part 
of the nobler spirits among men, and inspired 



A FORSAKEN GOD 151 

them with the narrower doctrine of seeking out 
the ways of nature. But science, if it has diverted 
many men who might have followed Goethe's 
Hellenic idealism, has In many ways supported 
his views : it serves truth, if not the whole truth, 
It encourages in Its servitors simplicity of life, it 
places their rewards largely in the satisfaction of 
the spirit. On the other hand, modern science 
tends to overvalue the Inanimate at the expense 
of life ; It encourages the notion that final truth 
may be weighed, measured, and tested ; too often 
It lays stress on knowledge for utility's sake, 
rather than for the sake of knowledge Itself, or, 
as Goethe would have done, for the Increase of 
sympathy which knowledge brings. By direct- 
ing attention to the manifold phenomena outside 
the real self — to heavenly bodies, to the sub- 
stances of our planet, to plants, germs, fossils, 
atoms, electrons, and all the phenomena of the 
sensible universe — and to our minds and bodies 
as things apart from ourselves, it necessarily be- 
littles the importance of the rounded perfection 
of self, the Importance of equilibrium in the sum 
of a man's relations to all things that are and to 
all things that may be. 

Science always concentrates attention on one 
small portion of life. There is no science of life 



152 A FORSAKEN GOD 

as a whole ; none that teaches us our relations to 
the universe. Science in itself is an unreal 
thing, an abstraction ; we no longer have science, 
but sciences. Like the children of Saturn, they 
have destroyed their father. There are physics, 
chemistry, botany, astronomy, geology, palaeon- 
tology, zoology, psychology, and many others, all 
destined to be divided and subdivided, and there 
will be as many more as there are objects of intel- 
lectual curiosity in the universe. The swing of 
scientific thought is centripetal ; each science is a 
jealous god and will have no other gods share in 
its worship. The field of attention for each ser- 
vant of science grows smaller and smaller. It 
would be as impossible now for a man to be a great 
poet and a great man of science, like Goethe, as 
for a man to be familiar with the whole sum of 
contemporary knowledge, as Dante was. Devo- 
tion to science, in this century, is necessarily fol- 
lowed by some such experience as that which 
Darwin underwent; the meticulous observation 
of facts blunts all finer sensitiveness to poetry and 
music. Science means specialization, and dwells 
on the multiplicity of phenomena ; Goethe wished 
a universal outlook, and was preoccupied with 
that unity which binds all to all. 

Luxury, the application of man's control over 



A FORSAKEN GOD 1 53 

the forces of nature to self-indulgence, sets the 
centre of gravity for human life in material things. 
Luxury is the care of our brother, the body, — 
St. Francis used to call it Brother Ass, — care so 
assiduous, so elaborated, so refined, that it ap- 
proaches to worship, and necessarily crowds out 
the care and solicitude that should be devoted to 
the soul. "Painting the outward walls so costly 
gay" is a far easier art, much more within reach 
of the successful many, than the decoration of the 
soul. The organization of modern industry, the 
multiplication of machinery, by giving more and 
more to those who have already, strengthens the 
thews and muscles of luxury. Luxury is head- 
strong, potent in its dominion over fashion, un- 
scrupulous in imposing its customs and opinions, 
insolent in trampling down all in its way. This 
IS what is meant by the phrase "a materialistic 
age"; it is the substitution of an easy art for a 
difficult art, of a gross material, the body, which 
demands the attention of the gymnast, the masseur, 
the chiropodist, for a fine material, the soul, which 
demands the service of the intellect and of the 
spirit. There is no danger that our Brother the 
Body will ever be neglected, or that material 
things will be despised. Goethe was no disciple 
of our Lady Poverty ; but he held that a man's 



154 A FORSAKEN GOD 

wealth consists less in what he owns than in what 
he thinks and in what he is. 

National sentiment has had a mighty career in 
the nineteenth century, witness Italy, Germany, 
Greece, Bulgaria, Servia, as well as the United 
States; and has by no means confined itself to 
political patriotism, witness the attempted revival 
of the Irish language and of Provencal ; but 
whether patriotism concern a race, a nation, a 
language, or a cult, it is by its very definition a 
limitation. The Preacher of universal compas- 
sion said, "Whosoever shall do the will of my 
Father which is in Heaven, the same is my 
brother and sister and mother." Patriotism has 
its own virtues, but among them is not that of 
maintaining Goethe's ideals. Even during Ger- 
many's war of liberation against Napoleon, Goethe 
was absolutely indifferent to patriotism, at least 
In its political form. He maintained the position 

Da wo wir lieben 
Ist's Vaterland — 

(there where we love is our country). 

Then there is the strong current of humani- 
tarianism, which tends to regard man as an animal 
with material wants, and spends itself on factory 
legislation, hygiene, sanitation, and almsgiving. 



A FORSAKEN GOD 155 

Goethe was not deficient in benevolence toward 
his fellow men ; but he subordinated this interest 
to his prime concern for completeness, for mould- 
ing within the individual a harmonious, beautiful, 
heroic nature; and since such an ideal for the 
mass of men is outside the pale of achievement, 
he did not extend his serious interest to them. 

V 
Added to these — and this cause of the failure 
of Goethe's ideals has perhaps been more efFective 
in America than elsewhere — stands democracy 
and all democracy means. Democracy has solid 
foundations of its own, — just as patriotism, hu- 
manitarianism, and science have, — and possesses 
its own defenders and eulogists. Goethe was not 
among them. He was an aristocrat; he believed 
in the government of the best in all departments 
of human society. The right of the best to domi- 
nate, even at the expense of the inferior, was to 
him axiomatic. Democracy, with its tenderness 
toward the incompetent multitude, with its ideas 
of equality and fraternity, with its indifference to 
quality when quantity is concerned, with its 
good-humored inefficiency and its vulgar self- 
satisfactions, was wholly aUen to his spirit. He 
felt no equality or fraternity between himself and 



156 A FORSAKEN GOD 

the multitude. In democracy the mass of the 
people possess not merely a voice in the political 
government, but also a voice in the moral gov- 
ernment of the nation, a share in the formation 
of the ethical, intellectual, sentimental, and ideal 
character of the people. Goethe would as soon 
have trusted these supreme interests to Demos, 
as Don Quixote would have intrusted his knightly 
honor to Sancho's keeping. Goethe regarded 
man primarily as a creature charged with the 
duty, and endowed with the possibility, of self- 
perfectioning ; but democracy values men accord- 
ing as they possess distinct and special capacities, 
according as they can do the immediate task need- 
ful to be done. Democracy, having many in- 
terests of its own, pays little or no heed to matters 
not congenial to it. Democracy is indifferent to 
form, because for democracy form and substance 
have no necessary relation; but to Goethe form 
and substance were one. Democracy is indif- 
ferent to elegance, because elegance is unsuitable 
to the multitude. Democracy cares little for 
beauty, because beauty establishes a caste apart. 
Democracy neglects art, for art rests upon the 
privileges of nature, upon the endowment of 
gifted individuals, upon special sensitiveness and 
special capacities ; art, by its very nature, means 



A FORSAKEN GOD 1 57 

achievement by the few, enjoyment by the few. 
Democracy looks to the achievements and the 
enjoyments of the many. Aristocracy is the 
assertion of quaHty, of rareness of vision, of clear- 
ness of conception, of refinement and finish; it 
lays stress on the unusual, on the beneficent in- 
justice of nature that enables lesser men to have 
greater men to look up to, and charges the greater 
men with deep personal responsibility. Democ- 
racy tends to belittle reverence, for reverence is 
devotion to that which is greater than ourselves, 
and seeks to find an object on which to spend 
itself. The reverent soul must believe in some- 
thing greater than itself, whether in the human 
or the superhuman ; it discovers, it unfolds, and, 
if necessary, imagines, something above itself. 
But Democracy has a passion for levelling, for re- 
ducing all to a common plane, so that no one 
shall complain that others have more than he, or 
are better placed. Such, at least, are some of the 
criticisms which the few pass upon the ideals of 
the many. 

It is the same with the democratic idea of 
fraternity. What, aristocracy asks, is the worth 
of brotherhood unless brothers have a goodly 
heritage to divide ? The important thing is to 
create an inheritance, whether of beauty, of 



158 A FORSAKEN GOD 

virtue, of glory; then let who can possess it. 
The two points of view also take issue over the 
idea of liberty. Democracy too easily abases its 
conception of liberty to the liberty to eat and 
sleep, the liberty to lie back and fold one's arms, 
the liberty to be active for activity's sake (as Mr. 
Dickinson says of us), liberty to do what to one's 
self seems good ; whereas aristocracy demands 
self-renunciation for the sake of an ideal, demands 
discipline, obedience, sacrifice. Democracy tends 
to set a high value on comfort, on freedom from 
danger, on "joy in commonalty spread" ; whereas 
aristocracy asserts the necessity of danger and of 
pain in the education of man. Democracy values 
human quantity, aristocracy human quality. 
Democracy tends to render the intellect subser- 
vient to the emotions, while aristocracy tends to 
put emotion to the service of the intellect. 

There are good grounds upon which democracy 
may be eulogized, — the ground of justice, for 
example ; that was not Mr. Dickinson's business 
nor is it mine; democracy's main fault consists 
in its failure to confine itself to economic matters, 
to politics, to material things, — consists in over- 
flowing its proper limits and touching matters 
with which it has no proper concern. Goethe 
had little sympathy with democracy, especially 



A FORSAKEN GOD 1 59 

in the violent form which it assumed in his day, 
in those manifestations that accompanied and 
followed the French Revolution. 

Another influence, springing from science, hu- 
manitarianism, and democracy, adds its strength 
to theirs. Goethe's ideal for the human spirit, 
however different from the ideals of democracy, 
bears no small analogy to the Christian's ideal of 
the soul. For the Christian the soul is every- 
thing, life is its opportunity, pleasure is a means 
of acquiring strength by renunciation, grief an 
aid to mounting higher, earthly losses are spiritual 
gains; his highest hope is to render his soul as 
perfect, as beautiful, as fully in accord with celes- 
tial harmonies, as may be. In Goethe this ideal 
was replaced by the ideal of a human spirit that 
triumphs over the obstacles of life, uses the affec- 
tions, the passions even, for fuller self-develop- 
ment; that aims at the harmonious fulfilment 
of all its capacities, and seeks knowledge for the 
sake of finer communion with deity in nature. 
The trend of practical religion, under the pressure 
of humanitarianism, is to regard the devotion that 
strives to render the soul perfect, as a form of 
egotism, and a kindred feeling swells the general 
flood of modern conceptions that have swept away 
Goethe's ideals. 



l6o A FORSAKEN GOD 

It might have been thought that the religious 
element in Goethe's ideal would have saved it 
in America, if anywhere, from destruction ; for we 
are a religious, or at least, as Mr. Dickinson 
would say, a superstitious people. Goethe's sym- 
pathetic approval of the theory that the human 
spirit tends toward a point of gravity at the 
centre of our universe, is consonant with per- 
manent human needs ; so is his sense of form, of 
beauty, of dignity. But whether it be the effect 
of democracy, of a childlike desire for novelty, of 
an undisciplined impatience with tradition, or of 
self-confidence in our power to create new forms 
of religion that shall more fully satisfy our own 
needs, or whatever the cause, the reasonableness, 
the conservatism, the restraint that mark the 
religious element in Goethe's ideal, have accom- 
plished nothing to maintain that ideal with us. 

So far it would appear that the causes which 
have combined to overthrow Goethe's ideals are 
scarcely more American than European ; and 
that theory is confirmed by the popular attitude 
toward Goethe's ideals in Germany, where they 
seem to have fared no better than elsewhere. 
The old gods of serenity and beauty, Goethe and 
Beethoven, have been taken down from their 
pedestals, and Bismarck and Wagner have been 



A FORSAKEN GOD l6l 

set up in their stead. The ideal of duty toward 
self has certainly not suffered loss of power, but 
the self that is the object of duty is a self of 
dominion, not over fate and inward lack of har- 
mony, but of dominion over other men. The 
heroic model is no longer that of Phoebus Apollo, 
but of a sinewed and muscular Thor. Domina- 
tion, not harmony, is the teaching of the most 
eminent German of letters since Schopenhauer. It 
is true that Nietzsche is the greatest upholder of 
aristocracy since Goethe; but Nietzsche did not 
care for measure, proportion, harmony, pure 
beauty. The whole development of Germany, — 
the most brilliant there has been since that of 
Italy of the Renaissance, — in energy, in material 
well-being, in orderliness, in science, in self- 
confidence, in ambition, has moved far from the 
conception of full-minded completeness of char- 
acter, intellect, and spirit, which Goethe taught 
in confidence that, like light in the dark, hke 
warmth in the cold, such completeness would 
receive the gratitude and honor of men. 

Are we not forced to the conclusion that the 
Zeitgeist is opposed to Goethe's ideals, that Mr. 
Dickinson's criticism fits democracy and its 
attendant phenomena rather than America ? Is 
it not democracy rather than America that is 

M 



l62 A FORSAKEN GOD 

"contemptuous of ideas, but amorous of devices" ? 
The Latin democratic countries must be excepted, 
for Latins have a natural gift for form and a 
special respect for intellectual accomplishment 
that colors even their democracy; besides, de- 
mocracy comes to them more naturally than to 
northern peoples. But if Mr. Dickinson had been 
travelling in Australia, New Zealand, or Canada, 
would he not have come to very much the same 
conclusion .? 

Our neglect to follow Goethe's ideal, however, 
remains our own fault, even if other democratic 
countries have committed the same fault. We 
have brought Mr. Dickinson's criticism on our 
own heads. We must profit by that criticism, 
and return to Goethe's ideal. Some steps to be 
taken are obvious. First of all we must fully 
satisfy the democratic desires of the Zeitgeist by 
making the spirit of pure democracy prevail in all 
matters of politics and economics, either by giv- 
ing pure democracy supreme power over these 
matters, or, supposing that there is some other 
way to accomplish the same result, then by giv- 
ing supreme power to the forces that can put 
such other way into effect. Then, when democ- 
racy shall have received its due, it must no longer 
seek to lay its hand on literature, art, higher 



A FORSAKEN GOD 163 

education, pure science, philosophy, manners. 
And then, — when the mass of men are politically 
and economically free, — we must preserve the 
sacred fire of intellectual light by setting apart a 
priesthood, a body of intellectual men who shall 
worship the God of truth and him alone. Our 
professors at Harvard, Yale, and elsewhere, for 
instance, constitute, or should constitute, such a 
priesthood ; but the public is not satisfied to have 
them serve the sacred flame : the public wishes 
them to apply that sacred flame to furnaces and 
dynamos. We do need, as Mr. Dickinson implies, 
intellectual traditions of generations of educated 
men ; those traditions should be taught as a 
sacred cult ; and their priests should be held in 
special reverence. Those priests should be most 
honored when they serve intellectual concerns in 
which the public sees no profit, such as philosophy 
and the classics. We do need, as a quickening 
fountain, in the midst of us, a spirit of reverence 
for intellectual beauty. Had such a spirit of 
reverence existed among us, should we have been 
so exposed to Mr. Lowes Dickinson's criticisms, 
and should we now be almost as remote 
from Goethe as from Dante or Plato ^ 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

A Dialogue Concerning the Loeb Classical 

Library ^ 

Brown, a historian. Jones, a clergyman. 

Robinson, a dilettante 

Scene, Brown's apartment 

Brown ; enter Jones 

Brown. — How d' do, Jones, delighted to see 
you. I hope that you are very well. 

Jones. — Very well, my dear boy, and you .? 
How are you getting on with your work .? Have 
you the German microscope under your eye .? Are 
you putting the atomic theory to use in history ? 

[Enter Robinson] 

Robinson. — How d' do, how d' do ? How 
are you, parson ? And how are you, Mommsen 
Gregorovius Macaulay ? 

Brown. — I have been loafing lately. I felt 
the need of contrast, of looking about me a little 

1 The Loeb Classical Library. Edited by T. F. Page and 
W. H. D. Rouse. 

164 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 1 65 

at the actual world. If one does not turn away 
from dead records occasionally, one is in danger of 
forgetting that history professes to be a record 
of life. 

Jones. — Does it ^ If the histories that I see 
record life, the world has been horribly dull. 
All past generations of Germans must have been 
delighted to die. I dare say that history should 
be a record of life; it certainly should record 
enough of human experience to teach us, the liv- 
ing, what to do and what to let alone. History 
ought to be of service; that is its justification. 

Robinson. — Yes, service in a broad sense, 
that whatever adds an interest to life is serviceable. 
I don't mean to correct you, mon vieux, but I am 
afraid you are tarred with the notion of a moral 
interpretation of history. 

Jones. — You can't avoid the moral interpre- 
tation of history, mon cher^ unless you are willing to 
eliminate from our lives metaphysics, ethics, relig — 

Robinson. — Gladly, gladly ! 

Brown. — Have a cigar .? 

[They take cigars and light them] 

Jones [picking up a hook]. — Hullo ! You, too, 
have got the Loeb Classical Library. Have you 
looked at it ? 



1 66 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

Brown. — Yes, a little, at the first volumes 
that have come out. 

Robinson. — I subscribed the other day. I 
have an empty shelf at the top of my bookcase 
that needs to be filled up. I call it my Via Appia, 
because I bury the classics there. 

Jones. — Do you frequent it } 

Robinson. — I read them on Sunday mornings 
as an excuse for not attending your church. 

Jones. — Pm more than glad to have you listen 
to louder preachers of piety than I am. 

Brown. — Seriously, how do you like them .? 
I mean do you think it worth while to republish the 
classics .f* This publication sounds like a challenge. 

Robinson. — It is a challenge, a serious 
challenge. It raises the question of the worth 
of the classics in its broadest form. 

Jones. — You mean the value of the classics 
in education as opposed to the value of science .? 

Robinson. — No, although that question is 
included. This is a challenge, not from a man of 
science, but from a man who is interested in litera- 
ture and professes a belief in the classics, demand- 
ing to know what we honestly, not professionally, 
not conventionally, but what, honor-bright, we 
think of the classics. The Loeb Classical Library 
says as distinctly as a dozen or twenty published 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 1 67 

volumes, with ten-score-odd to follow, can say: 
"Come, you are no longer able to take refuge in 
the inadequacy of your school and college ; you 
can no longer say that if you had but the necessary 
time to polish up your Greek, to practise your 
Latin, you would have Euripides in one pocket 
and Lucretius in the other, and in odd moments 
be gratifying your natural appetite for the classics. 
You have no further excuses. Do you or do you 
not care a rap about us?*' Here is, indeed, an 
embarrassing question for us who have always 
upheld the classics with our lips, for it does not 
come from the camp of the men of science, but 
from our own friends. So long as the classics 
were safely locked up in their Greek and Latin 
cupboards, we were always able to defend our- 
selves with an "if." This hypothetical, and, it 
is to be feared, sometimes hypocritical, defence, 
is no longer open to us, now that the cupboards are 
unlocked ; we have but to turn the handle and we 
shall be able to satisfy our hunger. Mr. Loeb has 
done the cause of honesty a good turn. We can 
no longer shuffle and evade, we must confront the 
question. What do the classics mean to us ? 

Brown. — Well, if this is a challenge, it is a 
fair challenge. Mr. Loeb has taken a generous 
view of the classics. His library, according to the 



l68 THE CLASSICS AGAIN . 

announcement, will contain not merely the litera- 
tures of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, but 
also the literature of early Christianity, as well as 
whatever there is of value and interest in later 
Greek and Latin literature until the fall of Con- 
stantinople. So wide a range, shelf upon shelf, 
eliminates whatever objections individual taste 
might have raised to a narrower selection. 

Jones. — Suppose that we were to take up the 
challenge and endeavor to frame an answer to this 
question. Should we not first have to face the 
preliminary question, what does literature in 
general do for us ? Must not that question be 
answered before we say just what the classical 
literatures mean to us I 

Brown. — Well, let's see if we do not agree 
on the value of literature in general. In the first 
place we all agree that life is a marvellous happen- 
ing. We find ourselves here in the midst of a vast 
flux of forces. Men of science bid us fit ourselves 
for this wonderful experience by studying matter 
and energy, the earth and its materials, the air, 
gases, electricity, chemical activities, germs, all 
the phenomena that touch our senses. This is 
sound advice ; we human beings are frail creatures, 
sensitive to the play of this infinite variety of 
forces. We feel, we suflPer, we enjoy. In fact our 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 1 69 

intelligence is a contrivance of nature to protect 
and guard our sensitiveness. Yet these forces 
of nature, these mysterious gods, so potent in sky, 
air, and earth, noble and terrible in lightning 
and tempest, in comet and earthquake, in the very 
great and the very little, manifest themselves still 
more terribly and still more nobly in human form. 
Our fellow men are the forces that make our life 
a pleasure or a pain, a happiness or a vain thmg. 
From them come love, affection, sympathy, appro- 
bation, distrust, disapproval, hate. They are the 
forms of energy that we need chiefly to study, 
and as it is difficult to learn lessons from actual 
life, it is important to study these human 
energies in the past, where at our leisure we 
can go over and over the record; there the re- 
sults of causes are chronicled as well as the 
causes themselves. 

Robinson. — But you are talking of history, 
not literature. 

Brown. — Literature is the only real history. 
The main records of the past are not contained in 
Gibbon, in Guizot, in Egyptian tombs, or in the 
fossils of the Wind River beds, but in the books 
of men who have recounted their experience of 
life. From their experience we learn how best 
to fulfil the duty of self-preservation. 



I JO THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

Robinson. — You give literature a terribly 
utilitarian twist. You present the obverse of the 
Delphic motto, Know Thyself; you say, Know 
Other Men, 

Jones. — Brown is right so far as he goes ; but 
he stops short. Brown is too eager to meet the 
men of science on their own ground ; he forgets 
what we of the cloth regard as more important 
than the body. The primary function of litera- 
ture is to feed the soul. 

Robinson. — The soul is a matter of meta- 
physics ; but literature is a part of our earth, it 
grows in the ground like an oak. Define what 
you mean. 

Jones. — I can't ; the soul won't submit to 
definition. It is illimitable. It is as much a 
yearning as anything else. On the one hand it 
comes into relation with God, on the other to 
matter. It's relation to material things is to take 
what they have to give, to nourish itself by that 
taking, to feed on love, on self-purification, to 
grow strong by detaching itself from hate, from 
vulgarity, from grossness. The preservation of 
the soul is quite as important as the preservation 
of the body, and it needs not only the robust food 
offered by daily life, but the daintier food, often 
more nourishing, more invigorating, of literature. 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 17I 

For in literature the souls of men express them- 
selves with more freedom and greater clearness 
than they do in actual life. It is hard to express 
the soul in deeds ; for life offers many hinderances, 
and the deeds of the soul are often blurred by the 
trivial or gross happenings of life, so that they no 
longer exhibit the qualities of the soul, whereas 
in literature the soul has been able to reveal itself 
most completely. So I value literature chiefly 
as the record of human souls. A knowledge of 
spiritual life in others helps my own spiritual life. 

Robinson. — That may apply to Thomas-a- 
Kempis or the Vita Nuova, but how about Madame 
Bovary, or // Fuoco ? 

Jones. — The records of a sick soul, of a dying 
soul, teach lessons as well as the records of a 
healthy soul. The pathology of the soul is a 
necessary part of spiritual knowledge. 

Robinson. — You fellows take professional 
views. Your wits have been subdued to your 
caUings. Life is not an endeavor to attain or to 
ward off, it is a matter of entertainment; it is 
neither a school nor a chapel, it is a theatre. 
Melancholy Jaques said the last word on that 
subject. Men and women are players, endlessly 
playing tragedy, comedy, farce, or more commonly 
a piece composed of all three. We must look at 



172 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

life objectively. The spectator's business is to 
interest himself in the plot, to welcome the thrill 
of tragedy, to smile at the comic, to laugh at the 
farcical, and all the time to take his presence at 
the play as a privilege, to value the lighted theatre 
far higher than the unknown without, where there 
is neither light nor sound. Literature is the record 
of past Hfe. It is a play within the play and to be 
taken at the same estimate as life, as an oppor- 
tunity for a most varied entertainment. 

Brown. — If our views are professional, your 
view IS the most professional of all. This universe 
as we see it, the result of toil, patience, energy, 
beyond the reach of man's imagination — 

Robinson. — Exists for the sake of the dilet- 
tante. Precisely; there is no other possible 
hypothesis. 

Jones. — Well, let us not wander too far from 
the subject. How does all this apply to the three 
literatures that Mr. Loeb has gathered together 
for the sake of challenging us ? 

II 

Brown. — Our opinions of literature are, as I 
understand them, of this general purport. Litera- 
ture, according to me, shows us the nature of our 
fellow men ; that is, it portrays those manifesta- 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 173 

tions of force which most affect us during our 
pilgrimage through life, and therefore enables 
us to use those forces to our advantage or to pre- 
vent them from doing us hurt. According to 
Jones, literature, being in its deepest sense the tale 
of the spiritual experiences of men, of the success 
or failure of the human soul, teaches us how to 
educate our own souls. Or, if we follow Robinson, 
and regard life primarily as a spectacle, then litera- 
ture adds immensely to the richness of the show 
by supplementing the incompleteness of the pres- 
ent with the greater completeness of the past, and 
so adds to the value of life. 

If we commit ourselves to these principles, how 
do we apply them to the three literatures which 
the first volumes of the Loeb Classical Library 
present to our attention ; how, to begin with, to 
the literature of early Christianity ^ That seems 
to fall rather more in your province, Jones, than 
in ours. What do you think of the volumes of 
the Apostolic Fathers and of St. Augustine ? 

Jones. — I fear I shall have to begin, as I used 
to begin my lectures at the theological school, 
with some general statements. Will you please 
bear with me, Robinson .? 

Robinson. — Reverie, if not sleep, is always 
open to me. 



174 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

Jones. — Christianity is the fruit of the mater- 
nal tenderness in humanity ; it was born of the 
great throbs of compassion for mortal sorrows, 
and at birth dedicated itself to the ennoblement 
of mankind, for in ennoblement, as it believed, 
lies our only hope of happiness. The first dis- 
ciples were sensitive men, ignorant of, or indif- 
ferent to, the pleasures of the world, who rejoiced 
in the belief that self-sacrifice for an ideal is the 
solution of life's enigma. The history of the 
beginning of Christianity is the most famous litera- 
ture in our western world, and, I suppose, fulfils 
Robinson's requirements as well as Brown's and 
mine. 

In that first period of Christian history the 
sacred fire was lighted. In the second period the 
task was of a different order ; that second task was 
to keep the sacred fire alive, and so, in order to 
protect it from the winds and rain, the disciples 
of the first disciples built about it the great edifice 
of the Church. In the book of the Apostolic 
Fathers, which contains the Epistles of Clement, 
of Ignatius, and of Polycarp, this devout process is 
plainly at work. [Jones goes to the table and picks 
up "The Apostolic Fathers."] The scene is in 
the Roman Empire, the time is at the end of the 
first and the beginning of the second century, and 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 1 75 

yet we are at once aware that we have left the 
precincts of the ancient world and have entered 
the purlieus of the Middle Ages. There, before 
us, crowned with light or darkness, as you may 
please to think, rises the mighty fabric of the 
Holy Roman Church. Certainly, my dear Robin- 
son, by this event the theatre of history was greatly 
enriched. 

Robinson. — The early Christians make a most 
interesting episode. But you must not exagger- 
ate their piety. The Emperor Hadrian, who was 
inclined, like me, to look upon life as a theatre, 
wrote to his friend Servianus a few words about 
the Christians in Egypt. "Egypt, which you 
praised to me so warmly, my dear Servianus, I 
found altogether frivolous, unstable, and shifting 
with every breath of rumor. Their one god is 
money; him, Christians, Jews, and Gentiles alike 
adore." 

Jones. — The emperor was looking for diversion 
and failed to get anything more than diversion ; 
and so when he wished to satisfy his longing for 
beauty, for an element of poetry in life, he could 
rise no higher than to gaze at Antinous. The 
Christians of Egypt may have adored Mammon, 
but there were Christians in Syria and Asia 
Minor who did not. Here in this book is proof. 



176 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

It contains poetry, exquisite poetry ; it asserts that 
poetry is the order of the universe, that poetry 
is truth. It is worth while, in our search after 
nourishment for the soul, to come upon men who 
believe this. In actual life there may be many 
such people, but they are hard to find ; those 
who live poetry are, in my experience, very 
shamefaced about it. Let me read you this. 
[Reads from Clement.] "The heavens moving 
at his appointment are subject to Him in 
peace ; " — but no, that is too long, I will merely 
read you his prayer. 

"Grant us to hope on thy name, the source of all 
creation, open the eyes of our heart to know thee, 
that thou alone art the highest in the highest, and 
remainest holy among the holy. Thou dost 
humble the pride of the haughty, thou dost 
destroy the imaginings of nations, thou dost raise 
up the humble and abase the lofty, thou makest 
rich and makest poor, thou dost slay and make 
alive, thou alone art the finder of spirits and art 
God of all flesh, thou dost look on the abysses, 
thou seest into the works of man, thou art the 
helper of those in danger,the saviour of those in des- 
pair, the creator and watcher over every spirit. . . . 
Save those of us who are in affliction, have mercy 
on the lowly, raise the fallen, show thyself to those 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 1 77 

in need, heal the sick, turn again the wanderers 
of thy people, feed the hungry, ransom our pris- 
oners, raise up the weak, comfort the faint-hearted ; 
let all * nations know thee, that thou art God 
alone,' and that Jesus Christ is thy child, and that 
we are thy people, and the sheep of thy pasture." 
Is there not something to be learned from people 
whose life is centred in poetry ? Does not their 
idea of what is worth while teach us something, 
which we, looking about us, would not be able 
to find for ourselves ? Do we not need, in a world 
preoccupied with chemistry, physics, biology, to 
remember that many men have found extra- 
ordinary help in prayer? Listen to this: "Love 
of joy and of gladness," says the epistle of Barna- 
bas, "is the testimony of the works of righteous- 
ness." "None of these things [sundry duties to 
be done] are unknown to you if you possess perfect 
faith towards Jesus Christ, and love, which are the 
beginning and end of life; for the beginning is 
faith and the end is love, and when the two are 
joined together in unity, it is God, and all other 
noble things follow after them. No man who 
professes faith sins, nor does he hate who has 
obtained love." On these wings the early Chris- 
tians flew high above poverty, sickness, oppres- 
sion, envy, and meanness ; they found the key 

N 



178 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

that unlocked for them the riches of Hfe; they 
discovered what we are all seeking ; they became, 
as Barnabas says, reKva cv^poa-vvrj^s, Children of 
Mirth. If a knowledge of early Christian litera- 
ture will help us to learn from them, there is 
something to be said for it. 

Robinson. — I agree that the picture of these 
men dragging their chains from Antioch to Rome, 
merely fearful lest some untoward chance should 
deprive them of the joy of being devoured by 
wild beasts, is highly melodramatic. The Roman 
amphitheatre has claims on the gratitude of 
posterity. 

Brown. — The interest really lies in the sin- 
gular power that these men displayed. Here is a 
belief-engendered energy that shames the dynamo. 
Polycarp had a countless line of ancestors, stretch- 
ing immeasurably back to the beginnings of 
organic life on this globe, and each parent in that 
countless line transmitted to his child one great 
duty, to shun death ; and for unnumbered genera- 
tions every child obeyed, until there in Antioch, 
Polycarp, under the influence of a fantastic belief, 
broke that primal law as if it had been a dry twig. 
In fact, these Christians claimed to control a very 
potent form of energy, and their method of 
exercising that control was by prayer. This is a 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 1 79 

matter of psychological interest ; we cannot study 
this power too closely, nor can we make too many 
experiments in the hope of becoming able to draw 
upon it at will. I think that Jones is making out 
a good case for his view of the value of literature. 

Jones. — As I seem to have the floor, I will go 
ahead with this other book, these two red vol- 
umes, The Confessions of St. Augustine, which in 
point of history constitutes another stage in the 
development of Christianity. The pages, it is 
true, contain a great mist of rhetorical piety (if 
that phrase is not too unsympathetic) ; but out 
of this mist every now and again emerge some 
human details, with the peculiar charm that bits 
of landscape have when a fog lifts and the greens 
of field and wood shine in summer sunlight. 
St. Augustine certainly has not neglected to gratify 
Robinson's taste for the theatre. But the real 
significance of the Confessions lies in its contribu- 
tion to our understanding of the soul. Will you 
bear with me while I read a little more } 

Brown. — Fire away. 

Jones. — The twelfth chapter of the eighth 
book recounts Augustine's retreat to a garden 
after a struggle between the Spirit and the Flesh. 
It tells how a rush of emotion overcame him, 
how he flung himself down under a fig tree and 



l8o THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

cried out between his sobs : [reads] "And then, 
Lord, how long, how long. Lord, wilt thou be 
angry ? for ever ? Remember not our former 
iniquities (for I found myself to be still enthralled 
by them). Yea, I sent up these miserable excla- 
mations. How long ? how long still, 'to-morrow 
and to-morrow' ? Why not now ? Wherefore 
even this very hour is there not an end put to my 
uncleanness ?" Then he heard a young voice, 
like a boy's or girl's, say in a sort of chant, "Tolle, 
lege, — Take up, and read," So he went back 
to the apostle's book and read, "Put ye on the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the 
flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof." He needed to 
read no further, "for instantly . . .all the darkness 
of doubting vanished away." His friend, Alypius, 
hearing of Augustine's experience, shares in its 
effect. They go to Monica, — Inde ad matrem 
ingredimur, indie amus : gaudet. There is a sim- 
plicity and directness in the Latin that is ill- 
rendered by "From that place we went to my 
mother and told her. She was overjoyed." 

And if any one is impatient to learn, in the space 
of a single page, the cause of the triumph of 
Christianity, let him turn to the tenth chapter of 
the ninth book, where Augustine and Monica, 
while they wait at Ostia for a ship to carry them 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN l8l 

home to Carthage, commune with one another on 
their religion, leaning out of the window that 
looked into the garden. They are considering 
what the Gospel means by the words, "Enter thou 
into the joy of thy Lord." I use my own trans- 
lation in part. Saint Augustine says : [reads] 

"Suppose that the tumult of the flesh be still, 
that the phantasm of the earth, the waters, the 
air, and the heavens be silent, that the soul itself 
be silent, and by not thinking of itself transcend 
itself, that dreams be silent and all the revelations 
of the imagination, and every tongue and every 
sign; suppose that every moving thing be silent 
altogether (for, if any one listen, all things say, 
we have not made ourselves, but He that is ever- 
lasting made us). Suppose, after they have said 
this, that they keep silent, since they have lifted 
up our ears to Him that made them, and that He 
speak alone, not by them but of Himself, so that 
we hear his voice, not by tongue of flesh, neither 
by voice of angel, nor by sound of thunder, nor 
by the riddle of allegory, but that we hear Him, 
whom in his creatures we love, that we hear Him 
without them — just as we now reach out and by 
swift thought touch the eternal wisdom that 
overspreads all things. Suppose that this exalta- 
tion of soul continue, and that all visions that are 



1 82 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

not in keeping be taken away, but this vision 
ravish the seer, swallow him up, and immerse him 
in inward joy, so that his Hfe forever shall be such 
as was his moment of understanding, for which we 
have yearned. Is not this : Enter thou into the 
joy of thy Lord ?" 

Brown. — You are right. Such lives are 
lessons in the largest sense. What you have read 
is not merely the meditation of a philosopher, 
pondering over an hypothesis that the mind might 
entertain, but a vital, creative energy sprung from 
a particular, definite belief. Such a life as his 
gives significance to metaphysics. Here is a force 
as little understood as radium or the magnetic 
pole, and it seems to have a greater power than 
they; Augustine's behef dominated his Hfe, and 
through him dominated a world, bringing noble- 
ness and joy. I quite agree with you, Jones. 

Robinson. — As a spectator, I applaud. Had 
Augustine not lived, my seat in this singular 
playhouse would have been of less value. 

Ill 

Brown. — After all, the pagan classics of Rome 
and Greece constitute the bulk of the Loeb 
Library. It is they that ask, "What do we mean 
to you.?" 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 1 83 

Jones. — I suppose that you have in mind their 
direct influence upon us; for indirectly, we all 
admit, they have affected us enormously. 
Brown. — Yes, their direct effect upon us. 
Robinson. — Unfortunately, they have no 
direct effect upon us. 

Jones. — Because we neglect them ? 
Robinson. — No; but because with our in- 
heritance, we cannot, or at least do not, look upon 
the classics with our own eyes. 
Brown. — Explain yourself. 
Robinson. — We are children of the ItaHan 
Renaissance. That movement, so far as it con- 
cerns the classical world, was an interpretation; 
and the interpretation that the Renaissance 
adopted has been handed down to us. This 
tradition has determined how we shall look, how 
we shall see, what, in short, our conception of the 
Greek and Latin classics shall be. 

Jones. —You are not speaking of scholars, 

are you ? 

Robinson. — No ; I speak of the conventional 
conception of the classics entertained by persons 
who are not scholars. Scholars have their own 
academic conventions concerning the classics, 
contrived by Selden, Porson, Jebb, and their 
coadjutors of Paris, Leipsic, and BerHn; with 



1 84 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

that I have nothing to do. I refer to the definite, 
conventional conception of the classics that has 
become a part of our western culture. This 
conception was shaped for us by the ItaHans of the 
Renaissance. To them the great world of Rome, 
of law, of culture, of civilization, that lifted its 
distant head above the coarse, inane happenings 
of the Middle Ages, was a golden time — Saturnia 
regna; it appeared to them as the Alps first ap- 
peared to young Ruskin, rising in snow-capp'd, 
inaccessible glory. In this matter, we are disciples 
of the Renaissance. We dress our minds in 
clothes of its fashioning. Dante's invocation to 
Virgil, in the wild wood in which he had lost his 

way, ^ , , T7- .,• 5 

Or se tu quel Virgilio r 

is, as it were, the first modern cry of greeting to the 
great figures of the ancient world. Then follows 
Petrarch's adoration of Cicero, and Boccaccio's 
eulogy of Rome. All the stirrings of the Italian 
mind turned toward the mighty past of Rome. 
From Italy this Italian conception of the classics 
spread to the north. France took fire. On and 
on the admiration of the achievements of anti- 
quity proceeded, invading England and Germany ; 
and finally in the eighteenth century it burst out 
again with renewed power. 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 1 85 

But, as you know, Brown, far better than I, of 
all this multitude of admirers, imitators, and 
eulogists of the classical world, those who have had 
most effect in fashioning our popular idea of what 
that world means, are the great Germans, Winckel- 
mann, Lessing, and Goethe. They, more than 
the others, justified the tradition and imposed upon 
us the conception that the antique world was com- 
pact of sobriety, poise, measure, and proportion, 
qualities that we find crammed into our word 
"classical." Lessing says, somewhere, "It was 
the happy privilege of the ancients never to pass 
beyond or stop short of the proper limit." 
Winckelmann expressed the same idea, and Goethe 
spent a lifetime seeking to impress this same con- 
ception upon conduct. "A man," he says, "may 
accomplish much through directing individual 
abilities to one goal; he may accomplish the 
unusual through the union of several capacities ; 
but the wholly unpredictable, the Unique, he 
achieves only if all his powers unite together in 
even measure. The last was the happy lot of 
the Ancients, especially the Greeks of the best 
time." 

Brown. — Nevertheless, in spite of Goethe's 
reference to the Greeks, in spite of Winckelmann's 
and Lessing*s belief that they were holding up 



1 86 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

Greek models to the world, in spite of the French 
classical tragedy, or the universal admiration of 
Homer, the meaning of the word "classical" for 
them was Latin, not Greek. 

Jones. — That is true, of course. 

Brown. — Therefore, although sobriety, meas- 
ure, repose, are contained in our word classical, 
there is a definiteness, a circumscription, a con- 
ventionality, a practicality, in the phrase, that 
could only have come from Latin influence. Our 
conception of the classics is Latin or at best 
Graeco-Latin. If the shapers of the classical tra- 
dition had been bred upon Greece instead of upon 
Rome, they never would have attempted to cram 
the meaning of ancient Greece into a conception 
which could be represented by a single phrase, 
even when that phrase — sobriety, measure, 
repose — has so much convenience to recommend 
it. You agree to this, Robinson, don't you ? 

Robinson. — Oh, yes ; you are perfectly right. 
My point was that we accept the classics upon a 
wholly traditional valuation ; and I was going to 
add that one of the great services which Mr. 
Loeb's classical library renders is that we are 
morally obliged to look at the classics, so far as it is 
possible, with our own eyes and make up our own 
minds about them. We must take the word 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 1 87 

classical down from its pedestal and see what it 
really means. 

Jones. — You were quite right, Robinson, to 
call our attention to this tradition, but you have 
digressed from the point. Let us get back to the 
subject we started with : What do these Greek and 
Latin classics mean to us .? 

Robinson. — Excuse me, parson, but I meant 
to remove an obstacle from our path. 

Jones. — It is for me, sir, to apologize ; you 
were wholly right. Unluckily the clock warns me 
that we have gone past half our time. 

IV 

Brown. — We all agree, I suppose, that the 
study of poise, measure, sobriety, self-control, 
would be of great advantage to us. And if tra- 
dition, no matter how it originated, ascribes to 
the literature of Greece and Rome those qualities, 
it is worth while to consider the matter and find 
out if there be any truth in that tradition. 

I think that a hasty glance at Greek literature 
will contradict tradition very flatly, and show that 
these traits were no more characteristic of the 
Greeks as human beings, than of ourselves. 
[Goes to bookcase and takes down one or two books.] 
Take Homer, and you see that the Greeks acted 



1 88 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

under the push of passion with the energy of their 
southern temperament. When Achilles is angry 
with Agamemnon he says: "Thou heavy with 
wine, thou with face of dog and heart of deer." 
And when he has struck down Hector of the 
glancing plume, he spurns his entreaties: "En- 
treat me not, dog, by knees or parents. Would 
that my heart's desire could so bid me myself to 
carve and eat raw thy flesh, for the evil thou hast 
wrought me, as surely there is none that shall keep 
the dogs from thee, not even should they bring ten 
or twentyfold ransom and here weigh it out, and 
promise even more; not even were Priam, Dar- 
dano's son, to bid pay thy weight in gold, not even 
so shall thy lady mother lay thee on a bed to 
mourn her son, but dogs and birds shall devour 
thee utterly." And after Hector is dead, "Other 
sons of the Achaians ran up around, who gazed 
upon the stature and marvelous goodliness of 
Hector. Nor did any stand by but wounded him, 
and thus would many a man say looking toward 
his neighbor: 'Go to, of a truth far easier to 
handle is Hector now than when he burnt the ships 
with blazing fire.' Thus would many a man say, 
and wound him as he stood hard by." 

Achilles is a passionate child, and the Homeric 
Greeks an emotional, excitable people. In Soph- 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 1 89 

ocles, you remember how the mad Ajax is de- 
scribed as mistaking sheep for his enemies. "Of 
part, he cut the throats on the floor within ; 
some, hewing their sides, he rent asunder. Then 
he caught up two white-footed rams ; he sheared 
off the head of one, and the tongue-tip, and flung 
them away ; the other he bound upright to a pillar, 
and seized a heavy thong of horse-gear, and flogged 
with shrill, double lash, while he uttered revilings 
which a god, and no mortal, had taught." 

The Trojan Women is one long wail, and Phil- 
octetes is almost as full of self-pity as Obermann. 
Even the aphorisms of Sophocles are often as 
intemperate as the utterances of the Hebrew 
prophets : 

"Searching out all things, thou in most men's 
acts wilt find but baseness." 

"A woman's oaths I write upon the waves." 

"Man is but breath and shadow, nothing more." 

Jones. — How about the lyric poets ? 

Brown. — From Archilochus to Bion there is 
passionate intensity. Passion can never be tem- 
perate, it forgets all else and concentrates itself 
on its own piercing sensation ; that was true of the 
Greeks as of all hot-blooded human beings — 

Robinson. — I suppose that those early Ital- 
ians really based their classical formula on archi- 



190 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

tecture, on the Greek temple and the Roman arch, 
and on sculpture, much more than on literature. 

Jones. — Critics have always confounded the 
arts ; they apply terms of painting to music, of 
music to architecture, of architecture to literature, 
and call their confusion criticism. 

Brown. — Poor fellows ! Perhaps you need 
not put them all into one category. But Robin- 
son is right, I think, in assuming that the tradi- 
tional idea of Greek literature has been taken from 
Greek sculpture and architecture. The makers 
of the tradition did not know Greek literature. 
You cannot compress the Greeks' expression of 
their experience of life into a single formula. 
Professor Wheeler says that ^^schylus is "mystic 
and transcendental"; Professor Shorey that 
"the antithesis of classical and realistic is as false 
as the opposition of classic and romantic." Mr. 
Gilbert Murray speaks of the "terrible emotional" 
power possessed by Thucydides ; and in another 
passage he warns us of the danger of serious mis- 
apprehension that lies in inferences based upon 
the judgment of the scribes who selected but a 
small portion of the great mass of Greek literature 
for preservation. [Takes up magazine and reads] : 
"When one reads accounts in textbooks of the 
characteristics of the Greek mind : its statuesque 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN I9I 

quality, its love of proportion and order and 
common sense, its correct rhetoric and correct 
taste, its anthropomorphism and care for form, and 
all those other virtues which sometimes seem, when 
added together, to approach so dangerously near 
the total of dull correctness and spiritual vacuity, 
it is well to remember that the description applies 
not to what the ancient Greeks wrote, but to what 
the late Roman and Byzantine scholars pre- 
served." 

Robinson. — How about Latin literature ? 
You stated that the tradition of classical sobriety, 
so far as it is based on literature at all, is based 
much more on the Latin classics than on the 
Greek ^ Perhaps Latin will justify, at least to 
some extent, the traditional view. 

Brown. — I can see no better ground for the 
tradition with regard to Latin than to Greek. 
Italian tradition having assumed that the ancient 
Roman character was like the masonry of the 
Colosseum, went further and assumed that Latin 
literature must have depicted it as such. But if 
we go behind the tradition and look directly at the 
Latin literature which depicts Roman character, 
we find that the ancient Romans were very much 
like ourselves, with no more poise, measure, 
sobriety, or repose than we Americans of to-day 



192 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

possess, if indeed as much. They were men like 
ourselves. Terence's famous line, 

Homo sum : humani nil a me alienum puto, 

sums up, as well as is possible in a single line, our 
two modern characteristics, human curiosity and 
human sympathy. Terence's dramatis persona 
have no suggestion of brick, travertine, or mortar. 
Take the familiar lines of Catullus, 

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, 
Rumoresque senum severiorum 
Omnes unius aestimemus assis. 

Let us live, my Lesbia, and love. 
And all the carping of stern old men 
Let us rate at a penny's worth. 

Read the verses in which Propertius bids his 
fellow-poet Gallus beware of falling in love with 
Cynthia, 

Non ego turn potero solacia ferre roganti. 

Were you then to come in supplication, I could not 
console you. 

And again, take his complaint, 

Me mediae noctes, me sidera prona jacentem, 
Frigidaque Eoo me dolet aura gelu. 
I lie prostrate, pitied by midnight, by the setting stars 
And the air cold with the frost of morning. 

Or, since Propertius fills one of the first volumes 
in the Loeb Classical Library, read the beautiful 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 193 

last farewell of Cornelia, daughter of Cornelius 
Scipio, to her husband Paullus, 

Fungere maternis vicibus, pater. 
You, Father, must fill a mother's place. 

Evidently the Romans had the same affections 
and passions as we moderns. The verses of 
Tibullus to Delia tell the same tale : 

Te videam suprema mihi cum venerit hora : 
Te teneam moriens deficiente manu ! 
Thee shall I look at when my last hour comes; 
Thee, as I die, my failing hand shall hold. 

Robinson. — But, if you disregard the meaning 
and listen only to the words, you find a dignity, a 
massiveness, in the Latin syllables that modern 
literature seldom or never has. 

Brown. — There you come close to the cause 
of the tradition. Compare Italian with Latin 
and you perceive why the humanists of the 
Renaissance found poise, measure, sobriety, and 
repose in classical literature. 

Jones. — I am a little confused. Am I to 
understand that you wholly reject the tradition of 
poise, measure, sobriety and self-control, as having 
no aflfinity with classical literature ? 

Brown. — Not at all. The tradition, begun 

by the Italians of the Renaissance, is based on a 

false analogy to sculpture and architecture, and 
o 



194 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

on the contrast between our modern Romance 
languages and Latin; but I believe that those 
qualities, though they do not lie in the character 
or disposition of the ancients, are qualities of 
their method of expression. 

V 

Robinson. — Translation Is the work of a 
hod-carrier. It carries from one language to 
another only the grosser parts that can be loaded 
and ferried across ; it leaves behind both form and 
color. Mathematics are the same in German, 
Italian, and English; but the simplest word has 
an individuality as marked as that of a human 
child. To the ears of familiarity and affection 
no other sequence of syllables can reproduce the 
tenderness of the mother tongue. By means of 
the Loeb Classical Library the reader of little 
Latin and less Greek has an opportunity to turn 
from the English and pick up a phrase or two, a 
word, perhaps, here and there; merely to do so 
puts him in the spiritual presence of the original. 
He is then, as it were, reading about a person's 
experiences, with the privilege at any moment 
of looking up to see that person's face. 

Jones. — That is true; but our question is, 
how do the classics themselves help us ? 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN I95 

Robinson. — The answer lies in one little word, 
art. The classics, more than any modern litera- 
ture, teach us art, and art is the conscious purpose 
of man to make this world more beautiful. 
Philip Sidney says that the object of poetry is to 
make this too-much-loved world more lovely; I 
should extend his definition a little further and 
say that the object of art is to make this world 
more lovely, more lovable, and more loved. 

Modern literature, compared with ancient 
literature, is careless, slipshod, not wholly grown- 
up ; it has little sense of responsibility. The chief 
duty it sets before itself is to hold the mirror up 
to nature and reflect the unintelligible happenings 
of life, in all their confusion, their inconsistency, 
their inanity. Ancient literature was dominated 
by a very different purpose, it had a profound 
sentiment of high duty. The creation, so it 
seemed to the ancients, had been left incomplete, 
and man, as the creature most divine, was charged 
with the labor of carrying on the uncompleted task. 
With bold hearts the Greeks set to work to piece 
out the incompleteness with literature, especially 
with poetry, to make up for the neglect of the gods 
by human achievement. I look on those ancient 
Greeks and Romans as I do on workmen who fill 
in the marshy shallows of our river fronts, put 



196 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

earth upon the spongy ooze, sow grass, set out 
trees, plant flowers, and create a garden where 
before was merely mud and slime. 

Brown. — Life, as Wordsworth said, and I am 
glad to see that Robinson supports him, requires 
an art, and of all the arts the art of living is the 
most useful, the most admirable. All conscious art 
is an attempt to transfer emotion or thought from 
him who feels or thinks it to other human beings. 
Art is the necessary consequence of human sym- 
pathy. Men are not happy in isolation; they 
undergo the experience of emotion, of thought, 
and they are impelled to impart this wonderful 
experience to others. Some men make use of 
marble or bronze, some of pencil and paint, some 
of written signs. But more primitive, more 
fundamental, incomparably more wide reaching, 
as means to impart emotion and thought, are 
manners and speech. I hardly know which of 
the two is more important. By manners I mean 
the bearing of the body, in every part, from head 
to foot, the whole outward man. Our human 
instinct, the inner impulse, the will to live, insists, 
for one purpose or another, upon our imparting 
emotion and thought ; to do so well requires art, 
to do so excellently is a fine art. To pass on 
emotion and thought unimpaired in their first 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN I97 

vigor, in their first freshness, adds the Hfe of each 
to the lives of all; it increases, intensifies, and 
expands all life. Feelings, thoughts, are seeds, 
shaken from the parent stalk, that lodge and fruc- 
tify in new soil. Each feeling, each thought, 
should pass on as free as light from mind to mind. 
This art — the human art I may call it — lies in 
the choice of words, in putting them in sequence, 
in laying stress, in what Petrarch calls il hel tacerey 
the art of silence, and in holding and moving 
the body, — eyes, lips, arms, hands — so that 
mind shall communicate with mind, free from 
obscurity or blur, as through an open window. 

Art is all one. We talk of the fine arts ; but 
that is an arbitrary distinction. Our abilities 
and our time are limited, and naturally we give 
ourselves up to that form of art which seems most 
suited to our purposes ; but one thing we are all 
bound to do, and that is to remain stanchly 
loyal to all art. The Greeks were the supreme 
artists, and we must go to them as to the fountain : 
head of the waters which alone can quench the 
human thirst for human sympathy. They teach 
us how best to live. By studying delicacy, 
beauty, power, clarity, in their written speech, 
we learn how much those qualities add to the 
fulness of life, and we take away a humble desire 



198 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

to do our best to render our own lives, and the 
lives of our friends, fuller, more complete, more in 
accord with the possibilities of life. 

Robinson. — Yes. As Brown was saying, the 
special qualities, sobriety, self-control, repose, 
which tradition assigns to the classics, although 
not true of Greek or Latin feelings, are in great 
measure true of the form in which those feelings 
are expressed in Greek and Latin literature. 
Tradition is wrong to attribute those utterly 
non-southern qualities to living Greeks and 
Romans, but it is right to recognize that they are 
the chief qualities in classical form. Form is the 
legacy of antiquity to us. Life is movement, it 
does not concern itself with form. Life at its 
best, at its highest, is passion. Passion is the one 
sacred quality that exists, so far as man can see, 
in the universe. The chief duty of art is to per- 
petuate passion by putting it in such form that all 
who behold shall be quickened and take away 
more life and fuller. The ancients learned that 
the only way to represent passion is through re- 
straint ; that sobriety and measure offer the least 
imperfect means to depict life in its intensity. 

That is the lesson of art for the theatre, as 
Hamlet knew before me. That is the lesson that 
Brown clamors for, the lesson of conduct. To 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 199 

learn it we must go to school to the classics. If 
the Loeb Classical Library helps us to comprehend 
the immense significance of restraint in the delinea- 
tion of life, it has achieved a great thing. 

Jones. — I have much in common with both 
of you, but, probably because I am a clergyman, 
my point of view is a little different. I advocate 
the classics because they constitute a retreat, in 
which the spirit may commune with the high 
thoughts of the past. Modern literature is 
modern ; it concerns itself with actual life, with 
our distractions, our trivialities, our romance, 
our getting on in the world, with all our coarser 
appetites ; but in the remote classics, in that cool, 
tranquil, distant world, we can surrender our- 
selves to contemplation, to meditation, to the high 
influences that always stoop to the soul's call. 

This remoteness of the classics aflPects me as my 
remembrance of gracious figures in my childhood. 
The people there seem to have a nobler aspect, 
a more goodly presence, larger sympathies, a 
wiser and a kinder attitude. We do not apply 
the lessons we learned from them directly to life, 
but we know that somehow the most valuable 
lessons in our lives came from them ; we cannot 
say just what we learned, but we possess a memory 
of quietness, of ripeness, of wisdom, of qualities 



200 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

that lie near the centre of life, and we feel that to 
them is due whatever gain we have made in grace 
and moral stature. Greek literature has a Hke 
effect upon us. 

We need, profoundly, times of seclusion, of 
withdrawal from the outer world, from the domi- 
nation of the senses ; we need to escape from the 
current notion that life lies in motion, in rush, in 
physical activity. We need a contradictory force, 
an opposing experience. We can no longer betake 
ourselves to a Carthusian monastery or a Benedic- 
tine abbey : the East is too strange, too little 
akin to us ; but the classics of Greece and Rome 
offer us a retreat, a refuge for the tired spirit, a 
home for the unquiet mind. I, for one, long to 
put on from time to time cowl, cord, and sandals, 
and dwell in the sequestered and cloistered classics, 
far from the senseless noises of the world. 

As to art, I agree that the classics teach it, that 
we need it, that self-expression is or should be an 
art ; and for me the function of this art of self- 
expression is to reveal the more delicate, the more 
subtle, the more spiritual elements of the soul. 
Many people, I believe, possess fine qualities, but 
because of inability to master their medium of 
expression, whether act, word or silence, those 
qualities, as Shakspere says, "die to them- 



THE CLASSICS AGAIN 20I 

selves." To preserve these tender blossoms of the 
soul, and to transmit their sweetness, is one of the 
problems of religion, a problem that needs the 
help of art. Without great art, conscious or 
unconscious, the self-revelation of all great spiritual 
souls would have been Impossible. David, if the 
psalms are his, St. Augustine, Thomas a Kempis, 
John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, are great artists. 
More than all other people the Greeks possessed 
the art of portraying the finer qualities of the soul, 
as well as the "deep and dazzling darkness" that 
encompasses humanity. 

Robinson. — The business of art — I merely 
add this in order to define my own position — 
is not merely to quicken all life, to heighten its 
pulse, by means of a fuller and freer intercom- 
munication of thought and feeling. Art must 
always be up and at work, refashioning the things 
of the earth for the good of man. Architecture 
can make a city beautiful, sculpture and painting 
can add their loveliness; but those arts merely 
concern things material. Literature has a greater 
duty. Literature must take the stuff that human 
experience is made of, work upon it, and convert 
it into nobler, more beautiful, more stimulating 
shapes. Literature must tear away the curtain 
of familiarity that hides the beauty in common 



202 THE CLASSICS AGAIN 

things. Or, as Parson Jones would put it, litera- 
ture is the angel, the aeon, the demiurge, that 
redeems this gross life and helps wipe out its 
shame. Would you rather see the England in 
which the men Shakspere, Chaucer, Words- 
worth actually lived, or that England as they, as 
poets, have pictured it } Would you rather have 
lived in France under Louis Philippe, in Russia 
under Alexander II, or as Balzac and Tolstoi 
described the one and the other .? I find all life 
chaotic until it has passed through the mind of an 
artist. 

Jones. — Robinson grows lyrical. That means 
that it is very late, and time to go to bed. Good 
night. Brown. 

Robinson. — Who cares for what the Isles of 
Greece were to the common men who lived in 
them ? But the realms of gold, which iEschylus, 
Sappho, Theocritus created, are still the home of 
beauty. 

Jones. — Come on, Robinson. You are a 
literary Niobe, all words. 

Brown. — Good night. Come again. 

Robinson. — Good night. My last word is 
Greece. 



LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 

I 

Readers of literature who entertain a fond belief 
that literature emancipates the human spirit, 
especially those who read European books in the 
belief that they are opening their souls as well as 
their minds, and that by training themselves 
upon things cosmopolitan they are shaking off 
the narrow bonds of national prejudice, have 
suffered a cruel shock. In this bloody upheaval 
of Europe, where all men are in dire need of tem- 
perance, serenity, and an emancipated spirit, the 
leaders of European literature are swept off their 
feet by the flood of national passion, just as 
madly as statesmen, news-vendors, fishmongers, 
merchants, and all who constitute the national 
mob. Is the "Republic of Letters*' as much the 
home of fanaticism, of the negation of reason, of 
mad self-love, as a military barrack ? Is there 
no medicine in literature to heal the mind sick 
with national egotism ? Or are the present chiefs 
of European letters — Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, 

203 



204 LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 

and the rest — not worthy of the respect in 
which the world has held them ? 

The "Republic of Letters" is an idea so covered 
with lichens of respectability that it has become 
an object of vague homage, and is commonly be- 
lieved to possess wonder-working properties. To 
it has been assigned not merely the large and 
serene duty of instilling respect for letters in all 
those who waste their powers in getting and 
spending, but also that of spreading democracy, 
of substituting peace for war, of playing a part at 
least as great as that hoped for from Christianity. 
The "Republic of Letters" is to break down the 
barriers between nations, pull up ancient land- 
marks, and establish a human patria. Several 
considerations have aided this notion. In the 
Renaissance, at which school our modern world 
acquired the complexion of its thought, all that 
was then acknowledged as literature — the classics 
of Greece and Rome — was termed the humani- 
ties; and Terence's apothegm, homo sum, hu- 
mani nil a me alienum puto, was weighted with 
new solidity. In this realm of the spirit every 
human being could find a home. The power of 
the humanities seemed herculean ; as soon as the 
things of the mind were recognized to be the 
real things of life, political boundaries, national 



LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 205 

jealousies, race-prejudices, would vanish of them- 
selves, and the problem of inhumanity be solved. 
This idea we have inherited. 

Besides this, in the "Republic of Letters" a 
succession of men have risen to the office of su- 
preme authority, not by right of heredity, not as 
representing God on earth, not at the will of 
a Pretorian Guard or a military caste, but by 
the universal suffrage of enfranchised minds in 
all Europe. Plato, Cicero, Petrarch, Voltaire, 
Goethe, are recognized as belonging to the 
whole world ; their great names knit up the 
ravelled sleave of national divisions and bind all 
peoples into one. Their influence spreads far 
beyond the boundaries of their native states, and 
unites men from east, west, north, and south, in 
common discipleship. 

Added to these grounds of hope that literature 
would arouse in men a recognition of their com- 
mon brotherhood, is the part played in the crea- 
tion of literature by curiosity. At bottom natural 
man is pure yokel, suspicious of men from another 
village, afraid of travellers from afar ; he builds a 
wall to keep the alien world away. Nevertheless, 
curiosity, the Ariel of the intellect, peers over the 
wall into what tradition asserts is the Cimmerian 
darkness beyond, and perceives something stirring. 



206 LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 

After all, the people within the walls are not the 
only creatures that walk erect. Curiosity climbs 
over the wall and ventures to reconnoitre; it 
wanders on further and further, making discovery 
after discovery. 

Literature is the noblest product of curiosity; 
we are curious to learn things outside ourselves. 
We wish to know the great deeds of our ancestors, 
how they fought the Trojans on the windy plains 
of Ilium ; we wish to know about the covenant 
made by our fathers with their God, how they 
came out of the land of Egypt, and were led 
across the desert into the land of Canaan. We 
are eager to become acquainted with the ways and 
doings of our less immediate neighbors, — Becky 
Sharp, Pere Goriot, Anna Karenina, Dorothea 
Casaubon, Hester Prynne. 

This tendency to inquire concerning things 
beyond our village, beyond our province, operates 
also concerning things beyond our national 
boundaries. We are as inquisitive about life in 
London, Paris, or Rome, as about life in Boston 
or New York. We wish to learn foreign manners 
and customs, foreign ideas concerning all the mul- 
titudinous manifestations of life. We are as 
eager concerning things cosmopolitan as concern- 
ing things domestic, and we demand that litera- 



LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 207 

ture shall tell us all about them. Curiosity in 
literature seems to take the direct road toward an 
international commonwealth. 

Such facts as these have encouraged pacific 
men to a belief that literature might establish a 
cosmopolitanism which should make all men 
brothers, and do what Christianity and the 
Roman Catholic Church have failed to accom- 
plish. And here and there, in rare instances, the 
idea of a world so concerned with matters of the 
mind that national discords fall like withered 
husks from the ripe fruit of the spirit, rises in 
majesty before some high and sensitive soul. 

In the year 1870, by the eighth day of Decem- 
ber, the Prussians had long been laying siege to 
the city of Paris. They had advanced from vic- 
tory to victory : the Emperor of the French had 
surrendered at Sedan, Marshal Bazaine had sur- 
rendered at Metz. On that day, in the College 
de France^ Gaston Paris, the famous teacher of 
mediaeval literature, began his winter's course 
with a lecture on the Chanson de Roland. 

He said, "I did not expect that I should reopen 
my course in the midst of this circle of steel that 
the German armies make round about us. Since 
I bade good-bye, in the month of June, to my 
kind audience, what strange things have happened ! 



208 LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 

Of those auditors who had already become for me 
almost friends, very few doubtless are here again 
to-day in this hall. Some are taking part in the 
defence of the city ; others, unable to take a hand 
therein, have gone to seek a little peace in foreign 
lands ; others, too, I cannot forget, are no doubt 
in the very camp of the invaders.'* 

Then he went on to say, — 

"I do not think, in general, that patriotism has 
anything to do with science. The chairs of higher 
learning are in no degree political platforms ; they 
are wrested from their true purpose if made to 
serve, whether in defence or in attack, any end 
whatever outside of their spiritual goal. 

"I profess absolutely and without reserve this 
doctrine, that learning has no other object than 
truth, and truth for itself, without any heed of 
consequences, good or bad, sorrowful or happy, 
that truth may cause in practice. He who from 
any motive, patriotic, religious, or even ethical, 
allows himself, in the facts which he studies or in 
the conclusion which he draws, the smallest dis- 
simulation, the very sHghtest alteration, is not 
worthy to have his place in the great laboratory 
where probity, as a title to admission, is more indis- 
pensable than ability. 

"So understood, studies in common, pursued 



LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 209 

in the same spirit in all civilized countries, form 
above nationalities — which are limited, diverse, 
and too often enemies — a great patrie which no 
war soils, no conqueror menaces, and where souls 
find refuge and that union given them in ancient 
times by *The City of God/" 

Nevertheless, this noble conception of a coun- 
try beyond the greeds, the vulgar ambitions, the 
baser passions of man, does not pomt to a "Re- 
public of Letters," but to a "Republic of Science." 
Science is the same for all men : the properties of 
numbers, the deductions of astronomers, the 
analyses of chemists remain the same whether the 
experiments are performed in Petrograd, Paris, 
or New York. Stars, rocks, radium, fossils, speak 
the same language to Swede and Spaniard, to 
Welshman and Serb. The sciences have one 
common mode of expression throughout the 
world ; that mode is experiment. Sir Oliver 
Lodge, Ehrlich, MetchnikofF^ Carrell, Flexner, 
Madame Curie, are all fellow laborers, — like so 
many carpenters, masons, and bricklayers, — 
busily at work upon the edifice of experimental 
truth. Their great tower ascends toward heaven ; 
and it will mount higher and higher, for no jealous 
god has cast upon the workmen the confusion of 
tongues. 
p 



210 LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 

Science has but one language, whereas thought 
which finds expression in Hterature is quite an- 
other matter. If literature embodied itself in 
some non-national medium, as numbers or musical 
notes, the whole weight of its influence would be 
in favor of brotherhood and unity. But, since 
the failure of Latin to maintain itself as a living 
language, literature has been dependent upon a 
medium which is the earliest and purest product 
of the national spirit, — language. Language is 
a steadfast assertion of national characteristics, 
national limitations, and national boundaries. 

II 

The spirit of literature finds its home in its 
native place. Literature must strike its roots 
into its native earth, and spread its branches to its 
native sunshine and its native breezes, or it will 
die. Literature is passionately patriotic; for it 
lives only in its native speech. Translate litera- 
ture into another language, and instead of the 
living tree, its head lifted toward heaven, its 
branches spread wide over its native soil, you 
have cords of wood piled up in the market-place. 

The great dictators of letters have dominated 
Europe through the power of national language, 
just as Caesar spread his conquests by means of 



LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 211 

Roman legions. Plato is universal because in a 
language unrivalled in its blending of intellectual 
and sensuous qualities he embodied the Greek 
spirit ; in the English of Jowett he is something 
quite other than himself. Cicero, by a Roman 
military splendor of rhetoric, by masterful control 
of the stately phrases of Latin, filled the world 
with his reputation. Petrarch, indeed, succeeded 
to the first place in European letters, because of 
his lordship in every department of Latin litera- 
ture, while Latin was still the universal language; 
but within a hundred years, all those grounds for 
his fame were forgotten, and he has since re- 
mained enthroned because he is the greatest mas- 
ter of delicate expression in the Italian tongue. 

Voltaire's renown throughout Europe was due 
to his happy power of embodying the essence of 
the Gallic genius in French prose. Goethe, the 
great apostle of cosmopolitanism, whose ideal was 
to lift his head above the clouds and fog of 
national discords, will surely, in the end, depend 
for his glory upon his lyrical poems, for in them 
he made exquisite use of what is best in the Ger- 
man heart and the German language. 

The only name which absolutely transcends 
national boundaries is that of Shakspere; but 
who can say that even his delineation of the hu- 



212 LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 

man soul in Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Cordelia, 
Imogen, Shylock, could have won such world- 
wide admiration, had it not been for his royal 
power over Elizabethan English ? 
Read him at random : 

There is a willow grows aslant a brook, 

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; 

There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds 
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; 
When down her weedy trophies and herself 
Fell in the weeping brook. 

Is it not this Shaksperian English that constitutes 
the wings of Shakspere's genius ? 

As all lovers of beauty were wont to make a 
pilgrimage to Rheims because the cathedral there 
was saturated with French genius; as we go to 
Florence because the Palazzo Vecchio, Giotto's 
campanile, and the pictured riches of the Uffizi, 
are profoundly Italian; as we visit the yew- 
shaded, tender-turfed, mellowed and memorial- 
laden village churches of England, because they 
breathe forth the very breath of England ; so do 
we betake ourselves to the great national classics 
of literature. 

The genius of a nation is the source of untold 
riches ; it has been bred by centuries, dandled by 



LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 21 3 

favoring circumstances, nurtured and tutored by 
a thousand random influences; it has taken to 
itself a multitude of discordant elements, trans- 
formed them into a homogeneous whole, and 
stamped that whole with the national effigy and 
superscription. 

Language is the most perfect expression of a 
nation's genius; it serves the nation's greatest 
needs ; it has had the greatest labor bestowed 
upon it. Generation after generation has 
struggled to express in language its tenderest 
love, its profoundest passion, its bitterest grief, 
its most subtle thought. One man added a word 
here, another a phrase there ; this man, as with a 
hammer, beat rough speech into smoothness 
and delicacy, a second rendered it pliable, a third 
fitted it for speculation. Mothers wrought it into 
a means of comforting their babies; lovers 
fashioned it into fantastic rhetoric of compliment ; 
thinkers moulded it into a substance so light 
that it is hardly heavier than thought. 

Finally, after a people has labored for centuries 
to create a national instrument, literature picks 
up that instrument and puts it to her uses. What 
literature shall do is determined by that instru- 
ment ; she has no choice, she is the creature of her 
tool, she is the handiwork of language. 



214 LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 

There was a time, hundreds of years ago, when 
cosmopolitanism dominated literature. The 
Latin language was but the spirit of the Roman 
Empire reincarnate in literature; the universal 
domination of one great people lived on in ghostly 
fashion. Even after national languages had long 
proved themselves amply sufficient for all the pur- 
poses of literature, brilliant spirits of the Re- 
naissance — Ficino, Poliziano, Erasmus, — even 
Spinoza and Leibnitz, wrote in Latin ; they wished 
to overstep national boundaries and write to all 
the world as fellow cosmopolites. And because 
they wrote in Latin, and not in their native lan- 
guages, what they wrote belongs to the domain of 
thought, not to the domain of literature. Learning 
and the Church strove in vain to maintain Latin 
as a living language; it died just because it was 
cosmopolitan and in no wise national. Every- 
where the power that carries literary fame through- 
out the world must be sought in some national 
trait. 

We must not be disappointed to find that in 
this tumult of national passion these European 
men of letters became primitive, elemental, 
blinded by national egotism. Men of science, 
whose home is the laboratory, who talk in electrons 
and terms of energy; philosophers, who spend 



LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 21 5 

their time in speculation concerning truth ; states- 
men, who know that under the promptings of greed 
all nations behave like savages, — these have no 
excuse for losing their moral equilibrium : physical 
truth, philosophical truth, human nature, will not 
be changed by the outcome of this war. But it 
may not be so with literature. These men of 
letters are instinctively right : literature, the 
food of their souls, depends upon national spirit. 
Literature would droop, decay, and become of no 
more moral comfort to men than mathematics, if 
it were to become cosmopolitan, or indifferent 
to national existence. 

Ill 

Does literature then do nothing to soften men's 
manners, to lift them to a large view of things, to 
enable them to surmount the Chinese wall of 
ignorance and prejudice which encircles every 
nation, to crush in their hearts the brutal and 
irrational war-spirit, to help bring about the long- 
dreamed-of golden age of peace and good-will 
among men ? The answer is that, of course, 
literature helps men in all these ways; but not 
by uprooting the instincts of patriotism. 

Cicero's eulogy of the benefits conferred by 
literature is as true to-day as on the day when he 



2l6 LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 

defended Aulus Licinius Archias in the Roman 
forum. '^ Haec studia adulescentiam alunty senec- 
tutem oblectanty secundas res ornant, adversis per- 
fugium ac solacium praehenty delectant domi, non 
impediunt foris, pernoctant nohiscuniy peregrinan- 
tur, rusticantur." (These studies nourish youth, 
they delight old age, they add a grace to pros- 
perity, they offer refuge and comfort in adversity, 
they are a pleasure at home, they are no trouble 
abroad, they will pass the night with us, accom- 
pany us on our travels, and stay with us in the 
country.) 

All this is true. The benefits of literature can 
hardly be overestimated^ Books enlarge a man's 
horizon. They raise a mirage of water-brooks 
and date-palms to travellers in a desert. They 
are "the sick man's health, the prisoner's release." 
Shut within a narrow routine of dull necessity, 
sad at heart in a world where wrong triumphs, 
where beauty has no assurance of respect, where 
humanity toils terribly merely for its daily bread 
or the satisfaction of trivial appetites, the earthly 
pilgrim need do no more than pick up a book, 
and lo ! he steps forth into another world. Here 
he is free from sorrow and care, free from the 
burden of his body, from envy, jealousy, con- 
tempt, self-satisfaction, from vain regrets, from 



LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 21 7 

wishes that can never wear the livery of hope, 
from narrowness of soul and hardness of heart. 
He may mingle in the society of the good and 
great; he may listen to the wise man and the 
prophet ; he may see all the conditions of human 
happiness and misery ; he may watch the human 
spirit, in its strife with circumstance, nobly con- 
quer or basely succumb ; he may go down through 
the "gate of a hundred sorrows," or accompany 
Dante and Beatrice through the spheres of Para- 
dise. 

By means of literature we step from our nar- 
row chamber into a brave world of unnumbered 
interests. After such experiences the reader 
acquires a larger view of life; in his heart he 
crushes the irrational and brutal war-spirit; he 
imagines for a season that men are brothers. 
And if this is true of readers who can leave their 
daily routine for the palace of literature but now 
and then, for an hour or two of an evening or on 
Sunday, it is far more true of the men who pass 
their lives in the palace and have contributed to 
its wonderful appurtenances. 

The humanities do render men more humane; 
literature does fit them to be citizens of the world, 
without depriving them of their own homes. Die 
versunkene Glocke, VOiseau bleu. Plays Pleasant 



21 8 LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 

and Unpleasanty Peter Pan, Jean Christophe, all 
seem to be proofs of a broad and sensitive hu- 
manity. 

But certainly Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, and 
their companions, swept away by national feel- 
ing, have given our world a shock. It is a natural 
disappointment; we had hoped that literature 
was an effective instrument of peace, and it 
comes with a sword. We are disappointed, not 
by what they have done, but by what they, or 
some among them, have left undone. Men whose 
country is threatened with destruction are right 
to cry out and fight for the preservation of their 
country, and men of letters more than others, for 
literature has rendered their own country still 
dearer to them than it is to other men. So far 
as their passion limits itself to the preservation 
of their own country, all the world will applaud 
them ; if they overstep that limit and support, or 
justify, any attempt to destroy another nation, or 
if they remain silent during any such attempt, no 
matter who makes it, they are false to literature, 
as well as to civilization and to the nobler spirit 
of man. All these distinguished European men 
of letters proclaim the sacred rights of their own 
nationality : but if one nation has a sacred right 
to exist, all nations have; and the infringement 



LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 21 9 

of a sacred right is a sacrilegious wrong. That 
wrong is committed by any man of letters who 
does not raise his voice and hand to prevent one 
nation from crushing another. There is an 
allegiance owed to Uterature. 

The world's literature depends for its richness 
upon diversity; and difference of nationahty 
creates the most interesting diversity. Life and 
its phenomena do not appear the same to a 
Russian and a Belgian. Crush Russia, and you 
maim or bruise her national Hfe, and with her 
national life her power of utterance, — you 
crush in the egg Tolstois and Dostoievskis still 
unborn. Destroy Belgium, and you deprive the 
world's literature of all that which new Maeter- 
lincks would create. No nation can be maimed, 
without suffering in soul as well as in body. The 
full functioning of national life is necessary to a 
fine flowering of literature. Athens produced 
/Eschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, in the time of 
her glory; England bred Shakspere, Spenser, 
Hooker, Bacon, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; 
Corneille, Racine, Moliere, La Fontaine, flourished 
in the golden days of Louis XIV. Lower a 
nation's vitality, and her spirit becomes languid ; 
she no longer possesses the living energy to pro- 
duce what she might otherwise have done. 



220 LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 

When a nation is sick, the noblest parts of her 
suffer first. 

A cowed nation cannot bring forth a noble 
literature. But a little state may have as great 
a soul as a mighty state; witness the Athens of 
Pericles, the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici, or 
Holland in its great days. No man of letters, 
unless blinded by ignoble passion, would consent 
to the national destruction of any state. The 
rule laid down by Immanuel Kant for the foun- 
dation of perpetual peace applies with double 
force to the lasting prosperity of literature : " No 
independent State (little or great is in this case 
all one) shall be capable of becoming the property 
of another State by inheritance, exchange, pur- 
chase, or gift"; and if not by peaceful means, 
still less by violent means. The Commonwealth 
of Literature demands that all her constituent 
parts be respected. 

Literatures can help one another; indeed no 
literature, unaided by another, can attain its 
fullest development. As each nation prospers 
best in material things by exchanging commodities 
with other nations, so each literature prospers 
best by exchanging commodities of the intellect. 
The cross-breeding of minds is necessary for new 
intellectual products. The history of all litera- 



LITERATURE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 221 

tures is full of the benefits derived from one an- 
other. Italy, Spain, England, France, Germany, 
in their respective flowering seasons, owe much to 
the achievements of the others. Literatures are 
like plants that need pollen wafted from afar in 
order to bear their brightest blossoms. The in- 
fluence of Shakspere, Scott, and Byron, of Mon- 
taigne and Rousseau, of Petrarch and Tasso, of 
Goethe, of Ibsen, of all fertile genius, has been 
nearly as great in foreign literatures as in their 
own. Destroy one nation and you deprive the 
literatures of all other nations of untold seeds of 
increase. 

The unworthy predicament in which some 
notable European men of letters stand, is that 
they have let themselves become so drunk with 
national egotism that they do not perceive the 
permanent need which the literature of each 
nation has of the literature of all other nations, 
and therefore they have committed high treason 
against the "Republic of Letters." 



Printed in the United States of America. 



THE following pages contain advertisements of a 
few of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects. 



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